How to Export Ebook Highlights to Your Digital Notes

Ebook highlights don’t stay useful once they’re trapped inside a reader: they can’t be edited, annotated, or meaningfully re-summarized. The practical fix is to export those highlights into a notes app where they become searchable, editable, and ready for later synthesis—ideally in one batch after finishing the book.

The workflow starts with waiting until the entire book is done, so the export happens once rather than repeatedly switching between apps. For a free approach, the method uses a browser bookmarklet called “BookSition” (spelled like that). After adding it to the bookmarks bar, the user logs into Amazon’s “read.amazon.com” page, where Kindle library books appear in a left-hand list. Selecting a book loads an overlay page that presents the user’s highlights in a cleaner text format, including the location within the book for each highlight—critical for retrieving surrounding context later.

From that overlay page, highlights can be copied or exported. One option is “copy to clipboard,” but it depends on Flash Player, which is increasingly unavailable and carries security concerns, so the preferred route is downloading or copying plain text directly from the page. The transcript describes copying the plain text and pasting it into Evernote, then cleaning up formatting using Evernote’s “simplify formatting” tool. The result is a single note containing the full set of highlights, including title and author fields, with enough structure to support later searching and re-use. In the example given, the exported highlights total roughly 9,000 words—useful raw material for subsequent summarization steps.

A paid alternative streamlines the same end goal with less manual work. The service is Readwise (readwise.io), described as built specifically to pull ebook and article highlights from wherever they were captured into a controlled notes system. After signing in, the dashboard acts as a command center, but the key action runs in the background: Readwise “sinks” new Kindle highlights continuously, then exports them automatically to Evernote. The transcript notes a cost in the range of $5 to $10 per month, framed as justified by automation.

In Evernote, this appears as a dedicated notebook (labeled “Readwise”) where highlights from multiple sources accumulate. A highlight note for a specific book is created automatically, and it stays connected to the same underlying item even if the user later changes the note’s title or moves it to a different notebook. Readwise is also described as resuming correctly when the reader returns to a book later, using a unique identifier so new highlights keep flowing into the same place. The core takeaway is straightforward: free tools can work with some cleanup, but Readwise reduces friction by continuously exporting highlights into an organized, editable personal library.