I have 400 books with Kindle highlights in, which totals some 5000 separate pieces of text. I tend to print off my highlights for later review, but recently I’ve been wanting a proper search function for them all, which Amazon doesn’t provide.
So, after some research, I bought a year’s worth of clippings.io and used its Chrome extension to port all of my Kindle highlights into its system. I’ll have to remember to do that periodically, to keep it fresh – I do a lot of reading and make a lot of highlights. But now I can run a search term through four hundred books’ worth of highlights in one action.
Being able to reach through something like fifteen years of reading at a stroke feels like gaining a new power. One that I always should have had, given that Amazon Kindle is a networked digital service. But it’s not one they ever fully thought through, marvellous though it is. For an extra fifteen quid, I’ve closed the circuit.