A practical guide · ~6 min read
The best sentence you've ever read is probably a Kindle highlight from a book you can't quite remember the title of. Multiply that by years and it's a small library of your own thinking — trapped in a device Amazon can lock, or a cloud page nobody ever scrapes. Here's how to get all of it out and keep it out.
Highlights are the closest thing to a written record of what an idea did to you. You didn't underline the whole page — you underlined that sentence. That signal is dense: what struck you, what surprised you, what you wanted to remember. Ten years of highlights is a portrait of how your thinking evolved.
And Amazon can take it. Not maliciously — but accounts get suspended for billing mismatches, region changes, or false-positive policy triggers, and a suspended account means no read.amazon.com/notebook until (or unless) support restores it. Devices die. Region-locked libraries get orphaned. The number of Reddit threads that begin "lost all my Kindle highlights" is not small.
Every physical Kindle keeps a plain-text log of every highlight, note, and bookmark you've ever made — in a single file called My Clippings.txt. It's stored on the device, not the cloud, and it survives Wi-Fi outages, account limbo, and Amazon's UI redesigns.
Open it in any text editor. Each block looks like this:
The Beginning of Infinity (David Deutsch)
- Your Highlight on Location 1234 | Added on Sunday, March 3, 2024 8:12:34 PM
The best explanations are the ones that are hardest to vary.
==========That's it. Every book you've ever highlighted, every note, in one grep-friendly file.
If you highlight on the Kindle app (iOS/Android) instead of a physical device, there's no My Clippings.txt — those highlights only live in Amazon's cloud. Go to read.amazon.com/notebook, sign in, and every book with highlights appears in the left rail.
Amazon does not offer a bulk export. Your options:
Whichever method, get the highlights into a plain text or markdown file you own. Cloud pages disappear; text files don't.
Konshus is one way to solve this — a persistent memory vault and portable persona that follows you across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and whatever ships next.
Meet KonshusOnce you have the file, you have a decision. You can drop it into iCloud/Dropbox and forget about it — perfectly valid backup. Or you can put it somewhere that uses it: a personal knowledge tool (Obsidian, Notion), a highlight service (Readwise), or an AI memory vault that clusters your reading into ideas you keep returning to.
The reason the last option matters: a plain text file of 4,000 highlights is unsearchable in practice. Nobody scrolls through it. A tool that turns your highlights into distilled themes — "you keep returning to explanations that resist variation," "your marginalia on grief cluster around Ecclesiastes and Marilynne Robinson" — makes the reading useful again years later.
Konshus imports Kindle highlights exactly this way: My Clippings.txt goes in, books cluster together, and the recurring ideas surface as atoms your Konshus can quote back to you.
Konshus reads My Clippings.txt, clusters your books by idea, and lets your Konshus reference what you actually read — not what a model happens to know.
Meet Konshus