Get your highlights out of a PDF or a Kindle

Highlighting is where most reading goes to die. The passages that mattered are marked, and then they stay marked inside a file nobody opens again, or inside a device, in an order determined by the book rather than by what you were thinking about. The value was in the noticing, and the noticing is now trapped.

Getting the highlights out is the step that turns reading into something usable. Once they are Markdown with page references, they can go into notes, a document, a proposal, or wherever the thinking is actually happening, and the reference means the passage can be found again and quoted properly rather than approximately.

Kindle's My Clippings.txt is worth knowing about because it is easy to miss. It is a plain text file sitting on the device, appended to every time you highlight anything on any book, and it is the only complete record. Plugging the Kindle in and copying it off is the whole extraction, though the file is chronological rather than organised, which is why running it through something helps.

The habit that makes this pay off is separating the highlight from the reason. A passage marked six months ago is often mystifying: it clearly mattered, and it is no longer obvious why. Adding one line about what it connects to, at the point of extraction rather than at the point of reading, is the difference between a collection of quotations and something you will use.

For anyone producing writing or research this compounds. What is being built is a searchable record of the good parts of everything you have read, which is considerably more useful than a shelf of books you remember approximately, and it takes almost no additional effort once the extraction is not a chore.

It runs entirely in your browser. What somebody reads and what they thought was important in it is unusually revealing, and there is no reason for any of it to be transmitted anywhere.