Where the highlights are

On the Kindle itself, in the documents folder: the file My Clippings.txt. The Kindle appends every new highlight to it and never removes anything. The file also holds what Amazon’s cloud does not: highlights in books and documents you put on the Kindle yourself rather than bought in the store.

For books bought from Amazon, the highlights also sit in Amazon’s cloud, but Beresta does not take them from there: only the file from the device.

Step 1. Take the file off the Kindle

1. Connect the Kindle to your computer with a cable.
2. Open the Kindle as a drive and go to the documents folder.
3. Copy My Clippings.txt wherever is handy — the desktop or Files.

If the Mac does not show the Kindle as a drive. Newer Kindles, and the Kindle Scribe after an update, connect over MTP, which macOS does not speak without a third-party app. Amazon’s help page suggests third-party apps such as OpenMTP; there is a detailed write-up at The eBook Reader. With such an app the file is copied the same way, from the documents folder.

Step 2. Bring the highlights into Beresta

• Mac: File → Import from Kindle… and choose My Clippings.txt.
• iPhone: the shelves button at the top left → the Tools section → Import from Kindle…. On iPad the same item is in the sidebar.

When the import is done, Beresta says in words what happened: how many new highlights and for how many books, how many notes, how many records were added to To Find, how many bookmarks were skipped.

What happens to the highlights

• A highlight goes to its book — the library book with the same title and, if it matches, the same author.
• No such book — a record appears in To Find. It is a card without a file: read on the Kindle, but the file is not with you. The highlights live with it. Add the book’s file later and import from the Kindle again, and the highlights end up with the book.
• A Kindle note becomes your own thought next to the quote it was written for.
• An extended highlight does not double. When you stretch a highlight, the Kindle writes a new entry and keeps the old one. Of two entries nested in each other, the longer one stays.
• Bookmarks do not become highlights; the summary gives their count.

Importing again is safe

The same file imported again produces no duplicates. Since the Kindle only appends to the file, the easy routine is this: once a month, take a fresh My Clippings.txt and import it whole — only what is new comes in. Colours and thoughts you changed in Beresta stay as you left them.

Honest limits

• The Kindle writes its service lines in the device language. Beresta understands English and Russian; entries in other languages are skipped, and the summary calls them “not understood”. Switch the Kindle’s language and take the file again.
• A publisher can limit how much of a book you may highlight. The Kindle then cuts the clipping, and Beresta cannot restore it — such highlights are counted separately in the summary.
• Kindle locations are not turned into Beresta pages: they are different counting systems.
• Highlights from Amazon’s cloud (the notebook page, emails) are not imported — only the file from the device.

What next

In Beresta a highlight is a thing of its own: it has your thought next to the quote, a colour, tags and search, and it can travel to your notes in Obsidian by itself. More on the home page.

Beresta is on the App Store, one purchase for Mac, iPhone and iPad. It needs macOS 26 or iOS 26.

Get it on the App Store

Updated 20261022.