Kindle

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Kindle is Amazon's book silo service and hardware e-reader devices for viewing those books. They utilize a number of proprietary file types including .mobi, .azw, .tpz, and others that often include DRM protection and prevent books from being transferred easily from one device to another or from being converted to other file types.

Data Export

Book files can often be exported directly from most devices by connecting them directly to a computer.

Highlights and Annotations

These are typically kept in a file named clippings.txt which is a simple text file with the highlights and annotations along with date and timestamps.

Highlights and annotations are also synced to Amazon's site at https://read.amazon.com/notebook and if one has a linked Goodreads account, they will be mirrored at https://www.goodreads.com/notes/.

Several services offer alternate means for extracting some Kindle data:

Clippings.io offers a paid service (as a Chrome extension) that exports Kindle annotations in a variety of formats. There is a free version that allows uploading of myclippings.txt to extract clippings. It also supports export to Evernote.

Calibre offers an import data tool

diigo is a bookmarking service that offers methods to export Kindle annotation data Introduce a new way to retain knowledge from Kindle books by Joel Liu

Readwise Will allow you to sync your Kindle, iBooks, and Instapaper highlights and review them.
- Bookcision provides a bookmarklet that allows export of annotations by book from Kindle in plain text, XML, and JSON formats.

Klib.me

Articles with walk throughs of some of the above along with a few other tools and options:

Reading Data

By putting your Kindle into FreeTime mode (usually used by Parents for their kids), your Kindle will track your pages read, minutes read, books finished, words looked up, and "achievements". They also save a file on your Kindle that allows you to extract the data. It is stored in a SQLite file on your device under system > freetime > freetime.db. See details: https://cagrimmett.com/tools/2017/04/18/get-the-most-out-of-your-kindle-with-these-4-tools/

Criticism

Remote Book Deletion

2009 Deletion of "1984" book incident.

Requires software updates or else

read
Amazon
highlight
annotation
https://twitter.com/_DukeWilliams/status/1279956067213094913
- "I was in the middle of reading. Is this what all you Windows users mean when things update outta nowhere?" @_DukeWilliams July 6, 2020
Setting my marginalia free
https://boffosocko.com/2016/10/24/notes-highlights-and-marginalia/
- "For several years now, I’ve been meaning to do something more interesting with the notes, highlights, and marginalia from the various books I read. In particular, I’ve specifically been meaning to do it for the non-fiction I read for research, and even more so for e-books, which tend to have slightly more extract-able notes given their electronic nature. This fits in to the way in which I use this site as a commonplace book as well as the IndieWeb philosophy to own all of one’s own data.[1]
  Over the past month or so, I’ve been experimenting with some fiction to see what works and what doesn’t in terms of a workflow for status updates around reading books, writing book reviews, and then extracting and depositing notes, highlights, and marginalia online. I’ve now got a relatively quick and painless workflow for exporting the book related data from my Amazon Kindle and importing it into the site with some modest markup and CSS for display. I’m sure the workflow will continue to evolve (and further automate) somewhat over the coming months, but I’m reasonably happy with where things stand.
  The fact that the Amazon Kindle allows for relatively easy highlighting and annotation in e-books is excellent, but having the ability to sync to a laptop and do a one click export of all of that data, is incredibly helpful. Adding some simple CSS to the pre-formatted output gives me a reasonable base upon which to build for future writing/thinking about the material. In experimenting, I’m also coming to realize that simply owning the data isn’t enough, but now I’m driven to help make that data more directly useful to me and potentially to others.
  As part of my experimenting, I’ve just uploaded some notes, highlights, and annotations for David Christian’s excellent text Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History[2] which I read back in 2011/12. While I’ve read several of the references which I marked up in that text, I’ll have to continue evolving a workflow for doing all the related follow up (and further thinking and writing) on the reading I’ve done in the past.
  I’m still reminded me of Rick Kurtzman’s sage advice to me when I was a young pisher at CAA in 1999: “If you read a script and don’t tell anyone about it, you shouldn’t have wasted the time having read it in the first place.” His point was that if you don’t try to pass along the knowledge you found by reading, you may as well give up. Even if the thing was terrible, at least say that as a minimum. In a digitally connected era, we no longer need to rely on nearly illegible scrawl in the margins to pollinate the world at a snail’s pace.[4] Take those notes, marginalia, highlights, and meta data and release it into the world. The fact that this dovetails perfectly with Cesar Hidalgo’s thesis in Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies,[3] furthers my belief in having a better process for what I’m attempting here.
  Hopefully in the coming months, I’ll be able to add similar data to several other books I’ve read and reviewed here on the site.
  If anyone has any thoughts, tips, tricks for creating/automating this type of workflow/presentation, I’d love to hear them in the comments!Footnotes[1]
  “Own your data,” IndieWeb. [Online]. Available: http://indieweb.org/own_your_data. [Accessed: 24-Oct-2016][2]
  D. Christian and W. McNeill H., Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, 2nd ed. University of California Press, 2011.[3]
  C. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies, 1st ed. Basic Books, 2015.[4]
  O. Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2004.https://boffosocko.com/2016/10/24/notes-highlights-and-marginalia/" October 24, 2016
https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1155098
Details on: How Do I Request My Data?