Do I need Readwise if I already have My Clippings.txt?

No. My Clippings.txt is more complete than what Readwise pulls (Readwise reads the cloud notebook, which misses highlights made offline that never synced). Readwise's value is the daily-review workflow and the connectors — not the file.

Does Readwise export?

Yes. Settings → Export → CSV / Markdown / JSON. Do it periodically; a services-based highlight archive that only lives in one SaaS is one billing lapse from gone.

What happens if Amazon suspends my account?

read.amazon.com/notebook disappears with the account, and Readwise's sync stops (it authenticates via your Amazon session). My Clippings.txt on your Kindle still works — the device doesn't check with Amazon to open the file.

Which is more future-proof?

A plain text file you own, backed up to two places you control. Any tool built on top of that (Konshus, Readwise, Obsidian, a folder of markdown files) is a workflow, not a backup.

A comparison · ~5 min read

Kindle vs Readwise: Which Highlights Survive 2030?

The bookshelf you can hold has always outlived the bookshelf you can only log into. The same is true for highlights. Three storage layers, three lock-in profiles, and only one that keeps working when the login screen changes.

The three layers

Layer 1 — My Clippings.txt. The physical file on a physical Kindle. Every highlight, note, and bookmark you've ever made on that device, in a single plain-text file. Not synced from the cloud — written as you highlight. Survives account suspensions, region locks, and Amazon UI redesigns because it doesn't depend on any of them.

Layer 2 — read.amazon.com/notebook. Amazon's cloud copy. Includes highlights from the Kindle apps (iOS/Android), which never touch My Clippings.txt. Also includes highlights from the physical Kindle, but only the ones that synced online. No bulk-export button. Vanishes if the account does.

Layer 3 — Readwise. A SaaS that authenticates against your Amazon account and scrapes the notebook page on a schedule. Adds a daily-review email and connectors into Obsidian, Notion, and Anki. Great workflow. Not a backup — it reads Amazon's cloud, so it inherits Amazon's outages.

Portability ranking

My Clippings.txt — plain text. Works in Notepad, on a Raspberry Pi, on a phone from 2011. No account required. Highest portability possible for text data.
Readwise export — CSV/Markdown/JSON from Settings → Export. Portable if you actually do the export. Portable-in-theory is not portable-in-fact.
Amazon notebook — no official export. Web scraping only, and Amazon has broken scrapers before by redesigning the page. Lowest portability.

The right answer is almost never "one." The right answer is: keep My Clippings.txt as your source of truth, use Readwise (or similar) for daily review, and export Readwise to markdown once a quarter.

Never lose your AI again

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 Konshus

What Konshus does differently

Konshus doesn't compete with Readwise's daily-review workflow — it does the thing neither Amazon nor Readwise does: cluster your highlights into ideas you keep returning to. Ten years of highlights aggregate into themes, and those themes become atoms your Konshus can quote back to you when you ask it a question. Feed both — Kindle for depth of history, Readwise for depth of review — into /vault/import/kindle and the same file that survives Amazon is now the file that talks back.

Frequently asked

Frequently Asked Questions

Kindle → Konshus → every AI you use

Drop My Clippings.txt in once. Your highlights become memory that every AI you connect can reference.

Meet Konshus