I built an app to organize Kindle highlights (and physical book quotes too)

As someone who reads a lot on Kindle and also on paper, I was always frustrated by how messy it was to manage highlights—especially the My Clippings.txt file. So I decided to build a simple app for myself, and ended up publishing it in case others find it useful too.

It’s called Book Highlights and it lets you:

• Import highlights from Kindle using My Clippings.txt

• Create and manage your own personal book library

• Add quotes manually or scan them with your phone’s camera

• Sync everything across your Apple devices via iCloud

I tried to keep the interface clean and minimal, just focused on helping readers organize and revisit their favorite quotes. If anyone here gives it a try, I’d love to hear your thoughts or feedback!

This is really nice (I feel the pain handling the Amazon clippings), we also tried making an app dedicated to exporting kindle highlights, we managed to make it work with an extension and it works in any chromium browser. Honestly Amazon is just a huge bulk of work (to say it nicely), to remotely make sth usable out of there highlights.

The one issue we could not figure out, is how to import books/pdfs (side loaded is the term I think) that are on a kindle device but are not 'bought' books through Amazon. We might just add sth later to allow adding ebooks and pdfs, non Amazon related in our webapp.

If you'd like to give it a try, it's called DeepRead (deepread.com), we're just a few peeps trying to create sth fun and useful ^^

Ps. Sorry for the little self promotion, but I'm happy to see this issue popping up still nowadays.

Pss. We were also thinking of building something that allows an easier export to Obsidian or other apps (we have an export functionality built in already which creates a markdown of the chapters and highlights). Let us know if that is remotely interesting.

Too bad one cannot export the highlights form the kindle app and import them into this app.

Now I need a computer and a usb cable, while I’m mostly living off road and off grid.

This is in no way the fault of your app. Just pointing out how Amazon isn’t for serious researchers. Just selling books is the bare minimum that they support, and only from the website, not from within the app. I’m sure Amazon is big enough to put the cork screws on Apple to not pay the 30% Apple tax?

The app looks beautiful, though I don't have apple systems.

On a related note, I built a kindle notes parser, which splits the highlights and transforms them into markdown.

My workflow is to dump my highlights into obsidian and build flashcards on top of that.

The app is open source:

https://github.com/woile/kindle-notes-parser

edit: I still don't like that I have to plug the kindle, to extract the highlights, it's a bummer, but in the end, it's just simple and works for me.

Very cool! This is the first app I've seen that allows importing Kindle's clippings file.

I like my Kindle but the software is very crummy. The font rendering is great, though. Noticeably better than KOReader.

Nice design. Does it work with side loaded books for the highlights?