By 
I’ve just come back from holiday and read a ton of books – a good slab of them on a Kindle. If you’ve got one, or run a version on some other device, you’ll know how convenient it can be.
And you’ve probably discovered how easy it is to highlight and take a note. One finger and swipe.
My question has always been, but what do you do with them then? Because as long as I can remember I’ve taken notes and made highlights in physical books, and they’ve stayed there – unless I leant on a cumbersome way of getting them into a filing system.
If there were some way of getting the notes out of my Kindle into Evernote, in a fully searchable format, that would be genius. I can use them for sermons and talks, without having to enter them into any database. (If you don’t have an Evernote account, it’s free and a really useful way to save any digital material – go to www.evernote.com)
At this point, I take my hat off to Michael Hyatt, whose post gave me the method. Head to http://michaelhyatt.com/how-to-get-your-kindle-highlights-into-evernote.html for the full article, but it’s really simple.
- Go to your Kindle’s home page at kindle.amazon.com and log in to your account.
- Hit the ‘Your books’ tab at the top of the page.
- Select one of your books from the list.
- On the top right there will be a message, ‘You have xxx highlighted passages’ – click that.
- You will now see a list of your highlights from that book. To get them into Evernote, use the Evernote web clipper in your browser’s toolbar – and voilà. If you don’t have the web clipper – a little elephant logo – Google ‘Evernote clipper’, and download the appropriate one for your browser (at the moment there isn’t an equivalent of this for browsers on iPads, so this has to be something for a bigger machine). The webclipper allows to you choose notebooks, tags and other metadata.
And there you are. You can now access your notes from any book you’ve read, on any device that runs Evernote, fully searchable. For the first time I can see how a Kindle can be a real advance on a plain paper copy.
What have I missed? Are there other useful tips and wrinkles you’ve discovered?
ministrynutsandbolts.com 
This is indeed a great feature and one that means I lean more towards kindle than I otherwise would. The only frustration is the limit on copying highlights imposed by publishers. What’s more frustrating is that Amazon won’t reveal whether there’s a limit and what it is in advance – you only find out once you’ve read and highlighted the book!
Yes – I discovered that problem too!
Hi Chris,
This is a great tip for Kindle users who want to export their notes to Evernote. A great feature of the Kindle is for users to be able to make notes and highlights but they can become difficult to access online sometimes.
There is an iOS app that will be released on November 2013 called Snippefy (www.snippefy.com) that will allow Kindle users to read and share notes and highlights all in one place. They can export these to Evernote, Dropbox and Emails too.
I hope you will find this interesting and useful too.
Thank you
Nathan
Hi Nathan
I’ll look out for it – thanks for the heads up.