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Amazon Gave Your Notes & Highlights a New Home on the Web

For many years now Amazon has enabled Kindle users to manage and share their annotations via a website at Kindle.Amazon.com (just one of many ways you can curate your notes).

Now Amazon has launched a new and much-improved way for readers to access their Kindle notes and highlights. Kindle users got an email today with the news:

We have good news. Customers have been asking for more ways to access their Kindle notes and highlights—especially on their phones.

We’ve created a new home for all your notes and highlights that’s easy to access from your phone, tablet, or PC. Now you can easily refer to your notes and highlights wherever you are. Visit the new home for Your Notes and Highlights at read.amazon.com/notebook.

The new site serves much the same purpose as the old, but it has a better design. It works on a smartphone and your iPad, while the older site was only designed to work on desktop web browsers.

You can use the site to delete highlights, add or edit notes, and the new Notebook site can also show you where you made the highlight.

I was just testing this site, and I found that I could use it to open Kindle for PC exactly where I had made a note.

This feature does not work on Android, however. (And for some unknown reason,  Amazon does not send you to its cloud reading app – even though it’s only a click away).

But none of that really matters; the new site is a huge improvement and will be quite useful.

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Comments


kaffedrikker June 7, 2017 um 3:05 am

Another thing is that it only works with books bought on Amazon, which leaves most of Europe out, since Amazon only have national shops in a few big european countries. Like in Kindle for PC/Mac sideloadet books are not supported.


Kathleen June 7, 2017 um 6:29 am

It works on books I borrowed on Overdtive through Amazon and no longer have. Yippee!


Jan June 7, 2017 um 3:36 pm

I accessed this using my Android phone.


Liz June 8, 2017 um 8:33 pm

It still doesn’t contain any notes made in personal documents, so notes made in non-Amazon books are apparently invisible.


Bill August 13, 2017 um 7:24 am

Have you seen this? "Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits." The new site will not let you access all your notes. If you read for research and highlight a lot, you are now unable to access many of your highlights.

Nate Hoffelder August 13, 2017 um 9:52 am

I hadn’t seen that, no.


Ron September 3, 2017 um 3:49 pm

Truncating highlights are a huge problem.
I cannot access many of my highlights now.
I like being able to select a book but the truncating should be stopped.


Ellen September 29, 2017 um 10:14 pm

”Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.” This is a disaster for me. I spent hours highlighting ideas to bring up at meetings. Ideas for letters to the editor. Ideas to share with my daughter and I can’t access them. I guess it’s time to go back to a real book and copy my notes. Anyone want to buy my slightly used Kindle?


Reader November 15, 2017 um 9:24 pm

If you use the desktop Kindle app, you can download the book and then select the Notebook icon on the left-hand menu. The highlights are complete and can be exported.


Joe January 15, 2018 um 12:36 am

Not true Reader. Unfortunately, many books have notes that are "Swiss cheesed". Even two word highlights are missing one word. Plus it’s random- some of my books it’s the last quarter of the book, others are in the middle,.. . Another site says it’s due to the publishers, but who knows? This is a total let down from Amazon, I had years of notes that are now mostly useless. Should have copied them before the change. I’ll be looking for a new eReader too. Hopefully there’s something comparable.


Joel Alleyne May 14, 2018 um 4:30 pm

I was thinking of writing an article: "How Amazon bricked my Kindle and made it very useless"

I use my kindle for academic purposes – like many in this thread – and since they limited by ability to use it to make notes that I can use for citations and quotes this it like trying to do research with one hand tied behind my back.

It sucks.

Joel


Mic Alexander June 2, 2018 um 12:43 pm

There is a way around the "export limit" for highlights and notes, but it is a bit of a pain. Find out where the truncated notes begin and mark that spot. Copy and past all the notes that are not truncated. Then go back to the beginning and begin deleting the notes and highlights until until a substantial number have been eliminated. (At least as many as were truncated.) Then close the highlight area for a while and then reopen it. If you deleted enough notes, the truncated ones should be visible.


Patricia Corrington October 27, 2018 um 11:26 am

I use my notes for bookclubs. what is with this truncated note? I need all my notes. I was to speak today on a book we have just finished and realized I am missing all the notes for the Last four chapters including the conclusion. This didn’t used to be a problem. Is this part o the "Great Improvement" that was made. You are rendering my kindle "useless."


Mark May 12, 2019 um 9:14 pm

I noticed this issue in my exports. I have been using readwise.io (rather than manual exports for the Kindle for Mac app or Kindle for iOS app) to consolidate all my highlights and notes. I then did an export of the same book’s notes from within the Kindle for Mac App. It gave the truncation notice (my highlights exceeded the 10% allowed by the publisher) but beneath it was a checkbox for excluding images from the export. Since the book had no images I didn’t expect this to make any difference but it did. After checking the box I was below the 10% limit. This suggests the book may have contained hidden characters the export code was interpreting as images or that there’s some other glitch in the code. In any case, I was able to export all my highlights to an HTML file, open it in Chrome, copy all, and paste into an Evernote file.

Even with this workaround, I will eventually hit the truncation limit in some books. I will modify my workflow to a two-stage process when this happens. The first stage will be as described above. The second will be to delete some or all highlights from the Kindle book, add the new highlights and notes that would have exceeded the truncation limit, and export. It’s a pain but still much more efficient than manually transcribing manually applied highlights and margin notes from a physical book.


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