What is My Clippings.txt, and how do you get it?

Why My Clippings.txt matters

Amazon's Kindle notebook only lists books you got from Amazon. If you read EPUBs converted for Kindle, documents you emailed to your Kindle, or books from other stores, their highlights never reach the notebook. My Clippings.txt is the one place they're all kept, in the order you made them.

How to get My Clippings.txt off your Kindle

1. Connect the Kindle to a computer with its USB cable. Wake the Kindle; it shows up like a USB drive.
2. Open the Kindle drive, then the documents folder. The file is called My Clippings.txt.
3. Copy it to your computer. Copy rather than move: the Kindle keeps adding to the original.
4. Eject the Kindle before unplugging it.

On Windows the Kindle appears in File Explorer under This PC. On a Mac it normally appears in Finder's sidebar. If it doesn't, your Kindle may connect using MTP (the protocol Android phones use) rather than as a plain USB drive, and macOS needs a file-transfer app that supports MTP to open it; a Windows PC will open it directly.

Getting it onto your phone

• iPhone: AirDrop it from a Mac, save it to iCloud Drive, or email it to yourself and save the attachment to Files.
• Android: copy it over with the cable, save it to Google Drive, or email it to yourself and download the attachment.

What's inside the file

Each clipping is one entry: the book title with the author in brackets, a line describing the clipping (type, page, location and date), a blank line, the text, and a line of ten equals signs. Here is what two entries look like:

Walden (Henry David Thoreau)
- Your Highlight on page 91 | Location 1385-1386 | Added on Monday, 3 March 2025 21:14:07

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.
==========
Walden (Henry David Thoreau)
- Your Note on page 91 | Location 1386 | Added on Monday, 3 March 2025 21:15:40

Read this again in a year.
==========

• Highlights, notes and bookmarks are all entries. A note is stored separately from its highlight; you match them by location. Bookmarks have no text.
• It only grows. Changing a highlight adds a new entry and keeps the old one; deleting a highlight on the Kindle doesn't remove it from the file.
• Export limits apply. For some books the publisher limits how much can be clipped. Past that limit the Kindle writes a notice that you've reached the clipping limit instead of the text.
• It's per device. Each Kindle e-reader has its own file with only the clippings made on it. The Kindle apps for phones, tablets and computers don't write one.
• Translated headers. On a Kindle set to another language, words like “Your Highlight” and “Added on” are in that language.

How to import My Clippings.txt into Quotabl

1. Get the file onto your phone (see above).
2. In Quotabl, go to You and tap Import My Clippings.txt (it's also offered when you first set up the app).
3. Tap Choose the file and pick My Clippings.txt.

Quotabl does the tidying the raw file needs:

• keeps the latest version of a highlight you edited, and drops passages contained in a longer re-highlight;
• attaches each note to the highlight it belongs to;
• skips bookmarks;
• groups everything by book and author, and keeps the date of each highlight;
• understands Kindles set to English, German, French, Spanish, Italian or Japanese.

Then your highlights come back to you in a two-minute daily review, on your Home Screen widget (iPhone) and in reminders. Books you bought from Amazon can come in directly with Kindle sync instead; see how to export Kindle highlights.