Importing Individual Kindle Highlights into Unique Obsidian Notes

Kyle Scheer
3 min readMar 5, 2023

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You’ve come to the right place if you:

  • Use a Kindle
  • Highlight books or documents with that Kindle
  • Use Obsidian
  • Want to import your highlights and notes into Obsidian
  • Want to import each highlight/note into it’s own unique note

Video Instructions

Video version of the below instructions

Written Instructions

Step 1 — Get Kindle Highlights

To start, you are going to need the Obsidian plugin Kindle Highlights. Here is a guide to get it.

Step 2 — Get Note Refactor

The following was stolen from this webpage — https://thesweetsetup.com/splitting-notes-in-obsidian/

Next, you are going to need the Note Refactor Obsidian plugin. This is a community plugin, so to enable Note Refactor, you need to go to Settings, then go to Community Plugins, and click Browse.

Next, search for Note Refactor and make sure that it is both installed and enabled.

Step 3 — Customize Kindle Highlight Settings

Go to Kindle Highlight settings by clicking the gear icon like in the photo above.
Click “Manage” to the right of “Templates”.
Go to “Highlight” on the left and then click “Override default template”

Add the following to the top of the Highlight template, as shown in the photo below. Then click “Save”:

### {{createdDate | date(“MM-DD-YYYY HH:mm:ss”)}} — {{title}}

Put in the circled text, then click “Save”

Close out of the Templates setting window after clicking “Save”. Close out of any more settings windows so you are back on the main screen.

Step 4 — Sync Highlights

Use the Kindle Highlights sync to get your highlights and notes.

Step 5 — Navigate to a given book/document file

Click on an imported document. Should look similar to the above.

Step 6 — Open the Command Pallete and navigate to “Note Refactor: Split note by headings — H3”

Open the command pallete with “CTRL-P” or “Command-P”

Press enter on it. Congrats! You now have individual Kindle highlights in unique Obsidian notes. Here is the result —

The original book file.
An individual note file.

Final Step — Continue customizing Kindle Highlight and Note Refactor plugin settings

Mess around with the settings, and make the system work to your heart’s content. Want to maintain the highlighted content after splitting the book file? Check out the “Transclude by default” button in the Note Refactor settings.

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Kyle Scheer
Kyle Scheer

Written by Kyle Scheer

I like writing about things that interest me. I’m hoping some of it may be interesting to you as well. Keep up with me and my projects at www.kylescheer.com

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