No matter what I’m reading on my Kindle, it ends up drenched in highlights.
Regardless of whether I’m reading fantasy, business books, or motivational nonsense, every impactful statement or strong quote gets some color.
The problem is I almost never go back to them. Like the highlighted paperbacks piling up on my shelf, going digital didn’t fix the habit.
Part of that is on Amazon. My highlights sit locked inside its ecosystem, cut off from all the Google platforms and tools I use for work.
My phone wasn’t a real option, either, because of all the reasons phones make poor e-reader substitutes.
I knew I needed a fix, and what I finally settled on did more than I expected.
Why Kindle’s highlight workflow is broken
Limits stack on limits, and none of them favor the reader
Kindles are great hardware, with solid design, a huge catalog, and some models backed by more than a decade of support from Amazon.
However, none of that matters when you try to move your own notes and highlights off the device.
DRM caps most Kindle books between 10% and 20% of their total text for export.
Publishers set that cap through licensing agreements with Amazon, mainly to stop an entire book from being reconstructed one highlight at a time.
For a 400-page book, that limit ends up being 40 to 60 pages of highlighted material before Amazon stops counting anything new.
Amazon tightened this in September 2025, when it started blocking copying from the My Notebook web page on certain titles, on top of the existing caps.
The Notebook page labels the rest hidden or truncated due to export limits, with no way around it from there.
There’s also a MyClippings.txt file stored locally on every Kindle that logs every highlight without the same limits.
However, the formatting is inconsistent across firmware versions, so it’s not something you can build a real workflow around.
In short, Amazon artificially limits any meaningful way to get your highlights out of the ecosystem. Or so I thought.
I tried fixing it with Google Drive sync
It’s simply not built for book highlights
The first solution I attempted was obvious. Amazon added Google Drive and OneDrive support to the Kindle Scribe in 2025.
I’d already picked one up for the novelty of an e-reader built around a stylus, so I figured the sync was worth testing.
I connected the Scribe to Drive by tapping the connections icon, then signing in with my account’s phone number.
The Scribe’s cloud connections only handle personal documents, PDFs, DOCX files, plain text, PowerPoint files, and images, along with notebooks created on the device.
None of the above includes anything from the Kindle Store, so highlights from purchased books were never part of the deal.
Files don’t sync automatically either, so you import a file to read and annotate it, then export a PDF copy back to Drive by hand when you’re done.
I set it up and confirmed the gap myself. Annotating an imported file on the scribe doesn’t push anything back to Drive on its own.
Readwise was the actual solution
A bridge I shouldn’t have needed to build myself
I didn’t have to look far for a solution I was happy with.
Readwise exists specifically to pull highlights out of Kindle, Instapaper, Apple Books, and similar apps into one place.
It connects through a browser extension tied to your Amazon account and mirrors whatever already shows up on your Notebook page.
Library book highlights sync the same way, as long as they’re uploaded to your Kindle account before the loan expires.
Highlights from personal documents you’ve sideloaded onto the device need a separate import method.
The export options are what matter here.
Readwise pushes highlights to Notion, Obsidian, Logseq, and a few other note apps, plus a direct sync to Google Docs.
After the 30-day trial, it costs $9.99 a month billed annually, or $12.99 if you pay monthly.
The Lite version costs $5.99, but misses the export features that made me turn to the app.
Setting up the sync
The NotebookLM integration is what sold me
Getting everything running took about 20 minutes. I made an account at readwise.io, picked Kindle from the import list, and installed the browser extension.
Signing in to Amazon kicked off the first sync, which pulled every book I’ve highlighted within a few minutes.
From there, I found Readwise’s built-in NotebookLM export, which runs through Google Docs instead of a direct API connection.
The export settings let me turn on automatic daily updates, include highlight locations, and choose one master document instead of one file per book.
I picked the single-document option and dropped that master file into a new NotebookLM notebook as its only source.
NotebookLM also started auto-syncing Google Docs sources this year, so I don’t have to manually refresh anything anymore.
After the highlights were inside the notebook, the Mind Map feature laid out how ideas connected across chapters instead of staying a flat list.
I’ve also used the Help me create shortcut to turn the document into a briefing or an FAQ. It’s a faster way back into a book I highlighted months ago and barely remember.
A small tradeoff for years of highlights
Since the whole chain runs through Readwise, I’m still capped by whatever export limit the publisher set on a book.
___That has made me highlight more selectively instead of marking up entire chapters, making the collection more useful on its own.
Everything now lands in Docs and feeds into NotebookLM without me touching anything. That means I can pull connections across books instead of losing them to a file I never open.
This has not only given me the Google-based access I was looking for, but it also gives me yet another way to use NotebookLM.
