How to organize Kindle highlights without Readwise

Kindle makes highlighting effortless. Organizing those highlights is another matter. After a year of reading you may have hundreds of marked passages spread across dozens of books, visible one book at a time and reviewed approximately never.

Readwise solves this with automatic sync, and it does it well. But you do not need a subscription to put your highlights in order. This guide covers where Kindle keeps them, how to get them out, and a lightweight system for keeping the ones that matter and seeing them again.

Where your Kindle highlights actually live

There are three places, and they do not always agree:

• The Kindle app’s Notebook — open a book, open its notebook, and every highlight and note for that book is listed in reading order
• The web notebook — Amazon’s Kindle web reader has a notebook view (at the time of writing, under Notebook on the Kindle website) that lists highlights for your Kindle books, book by book
• My Clippings.txt — a plain-text file in the documents folder of a Kindle e-reader that logs every highlight, note and bookmark made on that device

The first two cover books from Amazon’s store, synced across your devices. My Clippings.txt covers everything highlighted on that particular e-reader, including documents you sideloaded, but only from that device. It also keeps old entries when you change or delete a highlight, so expect duplicates.

One more wrinkle: publishers can set a clipping limit, so for some books only part of what you highlighted will export. That is set per title, and it is not something any tool can work around.

Getting your highlights out

Export a notebook from the Kindle app

1. Open the book in the Kindle app on your phone or tablet.
2. Open the notebook for that book.
3. Choose the export or share option, pick a citation style if asked, and send the export to yourself.
4. Open the file on a computer or in a notes app. You get your highlights and notes, grouped under the book’s section headings where the book has them.

Copy from the web notebook

On a computer, the web notebook is the quickest way to browse across books. Select and copy the passages you want; the page is plain enough that pasting into a document keeps them readable.

Use My Clippings.txt

Connect a Kindle e-reader to a computer by USB and copy My Clippings.txt from its documents folder. Each entry has the book title, location, date and text, separated by a line of equals signs. It is messy but complete, and it is the only route for sideloaded books.

A simple system for organizing them

The common mistake is importing everything and calling it organized. A few hundred unfiltered highlights are just as hard to review in Notion as they were in Kindle. Work in this order:

1. Pick one book at a time, starting with the one you finished most recently.
2. Skim its highlights once and keep only the passages you would be glad to see again. For most books that is a small share of what you marked.
3. Group what you keep by chapter or section, so each note carries its context.
4. Add one line to each: why it mattered, or what it changes about how you think.
5. Tag across books sparingly—a handful of themes, not a taxonomy.
6. Decide how the notes will come back to you. Without this step, you have only built a nicer archive.

Here is what that looks like in practice. Say you highlighted forty passages in a book about habits. On one pass you keep nine. Six sit under two chapters about designing your environment, so they go there, each with a line on what you plan to change; the other three are lines you simply want to see again. Nine notes, each with a home and a reason, is something you will actually review.

Doing it in Notion or Obsidian

In Notion, a Books database with one page per book works well. Inside each page, use a heading per chapter and paste the highlights beneath it, with your comment in a quote or callout block. A Themes property lets you filter across books later.

In Obsidian, create one Markdown file per book with a heading per chapter. Linking highlights to a small set of theme notes—habits, decision-making, whatever recurs in your reading—connects ideas across books, and backlinks show you where a theme keeps coming up. Community plugins can import Kindle highlights if you would rather not paste.

Both work. Both also leave review to you: nothing brings a note back unless you build a routine or a plugin to do it. For the trade-offs between these tools and a dedicated reading app, see our comparison of book notes with Notion, Obsidian and Anki.

Moving the highlights that matter into GleanNote

If you want review handled for you, GleanNote is a reading companion built around books, chapters and notes. To be clear about what it does and does not do: GleanNote does not sync with Kindle automatically. Nothing arrives in the background; you bring highlights in when you choose to.

There are two ways to do that. You can import a book’s Kindle notebook export or a My Clippings.txt file. It is read on your device, you see which books it contains before anything is saved, and highlights land under chapters taken from the book’s section headings, with your Kindle notes kept as comments. Or you can simply paste or type the passages that matter, one at a time, each with a line about why.

Pasting sounds like more work, and it is a little. It is also the curation step from the list above, done at the moment it helps most. Ten notes you chose are worth more at review time than two hundred you imported. If you do import a whole notebook, give it one pass afterwards and delete what you would not want to see again.

Build a review loop

Organized highlights only pay off when they come back. In GleanNote, the Daily Digest shows three of your own notes each day, favoring the ones you commented on and books you are currently reading, and it waits before repeating a note. Tap a card to open the note in its chapter.

For ideas you want to recall rather than just reread, flashcards turn your notes into a short daily deck: Start review, Reveal answer, then Got it or Not yet. On the free tier, the cards are built on your device from your notes, and Premium adds AI-generated cards.

If you stay in Notion or Obsidian, make the loop explicit: a weekly calendar block to reread one book page, or a spaced repetition plugin. The tool matters less than the appointment.

Frequently asked questions

Can I export all my Kindle highlights at once?

Not from one button across every book. The Kindle app exports one book’s notebook at a time, the web notebook is browsed book by book, and My Clippings.txt covers everything on a single e-reader. Readwise automates the collection if you truly need all of it in one place.

Why are some of my highlights missing from the export?

Usually it is a publisher’s clipping limit, or highlights made on a sideloaded document, which appear only in My Clippings.txt on the device where you made them.

Can I do all of this from my phone?

Mostly. The Kindle app’s notebook export works from a phone, and you can paste or import the result into a notes app or GleanNote without touching a computer. My Clippings.txt is the exception, since it lives on the e-reader itself and usually needs a USB connection to copy off.

Does GleanNote sync with Kindle automatically?

No. You import a notebook export or My Clippings.txt when you choose to, or paste highlights yourself. Nothing syncs in the background.

Is it worth organizing old highlights at all?

For the books that changed how you think, yes. For the rest, let them go. Start with the last three books you finished and see whether the review habit sticks before going further back.