Export Notes, highlights and bookmarks from non-Amazon books on a Kindle 2

Question

I have a Kindle 2 and I have some books I did not purchase from the Amazon store. Mostly PDFs, text files and .mobi files from other eBook stores.

Is there a way to export or otherwise back up my notes, highlights and bookmarks for those books?

Solution 1

Connect the Kindle and copy the file documents/MyClippings.txt. That has all the highlighted text as well as the bookmarks and so on.

Solution 2

For anyone who arrived here trying to sync highlights from a Kindle device to a Kindle app (such as on iPhone) and export them:

Unfortunately https://blog.clippings.io/2015/11/16/how-to-save-kindle-highlights-in-personal-documents/ mentions these important caveats:

For this to work, your highlights and notes MUST have been physically made on your kindle (not using Kindle on phone) because the Kindle App does not produce a ‘My Clippings.txt’ file, which is the only place where highlights and notes made on personal documents get stored.

To transfer highlights and notes from AMAZON purchased books you can use either the Clippings.io Chrome Extension, or simply use the ‘Click to Upload’ button.

It seems like exporting highlights/notes made on a Kindle app is not possible (unless maybe manually one at a time).

Solution 3

You may use this small app to parse your 'My Clippings.txt' for Win and Mac.

Solution 4

This one parse automatically the code, you can add custom tags on it. It is free unless you need to retrieve your clippings from the iphone kindle app (in this case you would need a paid chrome app).

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