Route Around Amazon Kindle’s Ridiculous Limits on Highlights Exporting With Bookcision

While the Amazon Kindle platform has a lot going for it as far as ease of use, it has a number of anti-consumers “features” built into it. One of those are limits that make it difficult/impossible to export highlights you have made of a book.

For example, I can’t even see all of the highlights I’ve made of a book on the Amazon Kindle’s online Notebook area, because after a certain point Amazon starts hiding them from me due to copyright issues: “Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.”

If I try to export those highlights from a Kindle app, I receive an error message like this:

This export will exceed the 15% limit set by the publisher for this book by 21%. New items will not be exported after the limit is reached.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Anyway, Bookcision is a bookmark tool for Chrome that routes around Amazon’s damage to your books. Drag the button to the Chrome bookmark bar, login to the Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader in your browser, click on a book, and then hit the bookmark. A window will pop up that has all of the highlights for that book with the option to copy/paste or download them.

It just works.

9 thoughts on “Route Around Amazon Kindle’s Ridiculous Limits on Highlights Exporting With Bookcision”

  1. Thank you so much for this. Much appreciated. Though the truncation of long highlights means that highlights will have to be probably restricted to around 1-1.5 page in length max

  2. Is it still working? I used this approach a few months ago and was very satisfied. Today, it no longer works. Any reasons?

  3. Bookcision does not work, it does not capture highlights fully. Don’t know if this is a new development (just tried it for the first time recently, no history).

    This is an infringement on my rights as a book owner & reader (I realize my “ownership” rights to Kindle content are not the same as if I own a hard copy book). If I own a hard copy book, I can fully highlight and keep all my highlights, so a year later, I can come back and remember what I thought was important about this book. I read mainly non-fiction and I’m a big highlighter. Frankly, once I’ve read the book, I don’t care if the Kindle book got deleted, but I care very much if my highlights are deleted – I would have to go back and read the book again!

    From searching online, it looks like this is a publishers’ restriction, possibly not an Amazon restriction, but obviously something Amazon did not object to. From your experience, can you confirm this? If not, any ideas how can we confirm the history of this agreement?

    From your perspective, what are the leverage points for changing this policy through our objections as Kindle readers? Who do we contact to move forward on changing this?

    In the meantime, do you know of any other highlight export services that can export full highlights? I assume the gating restriction is Amazon, not the highlighting service, correct?

    I own almost 500 Kindle books. For me, this is a complete deal-breaker for Kindle.

    Thanks for your help.

  4. It says made by the PUBLISHER, not Amazon, nor Kindle. Place the blame where it belongs. Publishers are the root cause of many issues, the main one being the gross prices of electronic books.

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