Export Your Kindle Highlights into Evernote or Google Sheets

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I take all of the passages that I've highlighted in a Kindle book and either stick them in Evernote or format them for Google Sheets.

It probably won't surprise you, based on my penchant for paperless everything, that I prefer to read books on the Kindle.  I still miss some things about physical books, but for me, the benefits of reading on a Kindle far outweigh them.  In particular, I like the search function and the highlight function.  Since I do most of my reading in bed, I really like not having to wrestle with a highlighting pen and a heavy book while reclining.  You might have noticed, if you highlight like I do, that even when you are on the Kindle app for iPad, you can't just copy and paste passages of a book that you want to share. Probably for copyright reasons.  

That said, what Amazon DOES have is a unique website for you that compiles all of your highlights per book.  AND Since this is just a regular webpage, you CAN cut and paste from here.  Here are 3 of the reasons why I use this site:

1. Share quotes - sometimes I want to share a great quote from a book I'm reading and the app won't let me copy and paste it into a text message.  I go onto this website and I can copy and paste to my heart's content.
2. Evernote Book Notes - I think I've mentioned how terrible my memory is.  I like to read, but I tend not to retain much unless I've made notes about the book.  I keep a Notebook in Evernote dedicated to books and articles I've read.  But it takes me forever to summarize a book I've read properly -- so, sometime I cheat and just create a note that contains all of the passages I've highlighted.  It takes a fraction of the time and, depending on how quotable the book is, sometimes works even better.
3. Research Papers - since I've gone back to grad school, sometimes I need passages from a book for a research paper.  For example, right now I'm doing a paper that uses a book by Anne Fadiman as a case study.  I read it on the Kindle, highlighted a TON of passages, and now I want to put them all into a Google spreadsheet so that I can categorize the quotes for use in my paper.

So, let me show you how to do this.  First you'll need to go to a browser on your computer and sign into the Amazon account that you use on your Kindle.  Now navigate to https://read.amazon.com/notebook (I'll put this in the comments section below as well).

Evernote

• First let's cover Evernote since it's more straightforward.
• Start selecting where it says "Yellow Highlight" for the first time and select all the way to the end.  Copy that by right clicking and hitting Copy or doing Ctrl+C.
• Open a new note in Evernote and paste by either right clicking and hitting Paste or doing Ctrl+V.  
• Now, I don't love all of this extra text, so I get rid of it.  I copy this text, go to Edit, Find and Replace, and choose Replace Within Note, and paste in the text string.  I'm basically deleting this, so don't put anything in the Replace With field.  Now click on Replace All.  And now it looks like this -- much cleaner, right?  If you don't even want the location numbers, I'll show you how to get rid of them, but it takes a little doing.

Google Sheets

• Now let's do Google Sheets, which is a little more complicated, but gives you more options to manipulate the information.  Like removing the location numbers.
• Okay -- do the same thing we did before, copy all your highlights and create a new Google Sheet by going to Google Drive, choosing New and Google Sheets.
• Now, paste in the notes.  You can see the formatting is kind of a mess.  Alright we are going to clean this up, so bear with me.
• First of all, let's get rid of the extraneous text, just like we did in Evernote.  Go up to the first cell and select everything up to the number -- including that space just before the number.  Okay, copy that.
• Now go to Edit, Find and Replace, and paste that text string into the Find field.  Leave the Replace with field blank and hit Replace All.  Okay -- already looking better.
• Now I want location number and quote on the same row, so when I sort the spreadsheet, they move together.  Here's how we are going to make that happen.
• This only works if you only have highlights.  If you also have some notes, you are going to need to take them out.  So, go down to where you have a note and select that row plus the row above it so that it's consistent.  Now right click and delete those rows.
• Go back up to the top of the sheet.  Start selecting where the first text appears and select all the way the end of the content.  Like this.   Okay -- now hit Copy (not Cut).
• Now go back up to the top and put your cursor in the cell just to the right of the first number -- cell B1.  Now paste.  
• Now we have the page numbers and quotes together.  We just have to get rid of the duplicate and blank rows.
• So, hit this square right here to select the whole worksheet, then go to Data, Sort Range, and Sort by Column A.  
• Scroll down and start selecting the rows right after the numbers stop.  Delete all of those duplicate rows.  
• See what we have now?  Clever, right?  So, now you can clean up this worksheet by changing the column width, wrapping the text, and adding header row
• If you want, you can delete the Location number column and paste this back into Evernote with quotes only.
• When I use this for research, I add another column that indicates which section of the paper this quote can be used for.  Then I can sort them by section for when I'm writing.

I love this feature of Kindle books.  Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!