One of the nice thing about reading books on kindle is your ability to take

One of the nice thing about reading books on kindle is your ability to take notes as you read in a way that doesn’t despoil a book. Another advantage of having electronic notes is that you can do interesting things with them (in my case I’m feeding them into anki).

Exporting kindle notes

The easiest way I found to export notes from a kindle (particular from a phone acting as a kindle was via the annotations website:

https://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights.

This unfortunately lacks the exact location of the note but is good enough for many use cases.

Better ways to export

This was good enough for me though I didn’t go further. The more paranoid impulses in me say that I should be liberating as much of my data as possible in case kindle decides to destroy it – but I decided I was happy in the knowledge that this could be done, and trust that someone will start complaining if amazon decides to stop letting you do this in good time for me to react.

In case this is the use case you are after or you have more advanced uses for your highlights then there were a couple of approaches I came across on the internet, but didn’t use:

• There appears to be a PERL script to do this for you
• The read.amazon.com site looks like it would be very easy to scrape.
• kindle readers supposedly