How to get your Kindle highlights into Anki

You have years of Kindle highlights and an Anki habit, and the two never meet. Getting them together takes four steps: get the highlights out, choose the ones worth keeping, turn them into good cards, and import them.

Why importing everything is a mistake

The tempting move is to dump every highlight into Anki and let spaced repetition do the rest. It doesn't work. A raw highlight is a sentence with no question attached. Anki shows it to you, you nod, you press "good", and you've learned nothing. Worse, a few books' worth of highlights is hundreds of cards, and a deck that size becomes a chore you abandon within weeks.

The cards that work are the ones you choose and shape. Fewer cards, each one asking you something.

Step 1: Get the highlights out

Every highlight on an e-ink Kindle is saved to a file called My Clippings.txt in the documents folder. Connect the Kindle to a computer with a cable, open its drive and copy that file. Copy it rather than moving it, so the Kindle keeps adding to it.

Highlights made in the Kindle app on a phone or tablet aren't in that file. For books bought from Amazon, you can find them at read.amazon.com/notebook.

Step 2: Choose what's worth a card

Go through one book at a time. Keep a highlight only if it holds something you'd want to recall without the book in front of you:

• a fact, a name or a date,
• a definition or a term,
• a claim or idea you want to be able to state from memory.

Five to fifteen cards per book is a good range. Skip the highlights you marked just because they sounded nice.

Step 3: Write the card

Anki has two simple card types that work well for highlights.

Cloze cards hide part of a sentence. In Anki's Cloze note type, you mark the hidden part with double curly braces and c1, like this: {{c1::hidden words}}. They work best for facts and terms.

Basic cards have a question on the front and an answer on the back. They work better for ideas, where hiding one word doesn't capture the point.

Whichever you use, add the book's title to the card. Without context, a card from a highlight can be confusing a few months later.

A worked example

Say these two highlights are in your file. One is from a history book:

The printing press was developed by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz around 1440.

That's a fact, so it becomes a cloze card. Hide the name on one card and the city on another, so a miss on one doesn't drag the other back:

The printing press was developed by {{c1::Johannes Gutenberg}} in Mainz around 1440.
The printing press was developed by Johannes Gutenberg in {{c1::Mainz}} around 1440.

The other is from Thoreau's Walden:

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

Hiding one word here would miss the point. It becomes a basic card:

Front: In Walden, what does Thoreau say wastes our lives, and what is his answer?
Back: Detail. His answer is to simplify.

Step 4: Build a CSV file

A CSV file is plain text with one card per line and the fields separated by commas. You can make one in any spreadsheet app and save it as CSV with UTF-8 encoding, so accented letters survive the import. For Basic cards, use two columns: Front and Back. For Cloze cards, put the cloze text in the first column and, if you like, the book title in a second column for the Back Extra field. If a field contains a comma, keep it in quotes.

Step 5: Import into Anki

1. In Anki on your computer, choose File, then Import, and select your CSV file.
2. Choose the note type (Basic or Cloze) and the deck the cards should go into.
3. Check that the field separator is set to comma.
4. Match each column to the right field, for example column 1 to Front and column 2 to Back.
5. Import, then open a few cards to make sure they look right.

The import screen looks a little different depending on your Anki version, but the same choices are always there.

A shortcut

If you'd rather skip the spreadsheet, ClearRead reads My Clippings.txt directly. In its memory box you select a sentence and choose which words to hide, and the cards export as an Anki-format CSV ready to import. If you just want to read through your highlights first, there's also a free Kindle highlights viewer that opens the file in your browser.

Make it a monthly habit

Once a month, copy the file, pick the books you finished, and make cards from the best highlights. It takes twenty minutes. Months later, the ideas from those books will still be there when you need them, instead of sitting unread in a text file on your Kindle.