Copy-Paste Text from Kindle Books to a Word Document

I am a regular reader of Kindle eBooks and sometimes find it necessary to use the copy-paste feature to highlight a selection and use it elsewhere, say in a Word document.

Kindle doesn’t seem to have the copy-paste functionality, or, I am unaware of it.

Any tips?
– Tushar Mankand

  • You can copy text from Kindle ebooks and paste them in emails or documents though the process isn’t quite intuitive.

    Step 1. Open any ebook in your Kindle reader and make a selection – you can save the selection as a highlight or create a note.
    Step 2. Go to the Kindle menu and sync the changes.
    Step 3. Open kindle.amazon.com, sign-in with your Amazon ID that you used to register your Kindle, and choose the Your Highlights link.

    Here you will see all the highlighted passages in plain text that you can save / export to other formats.

    One more think. You can highlight notes in Kindle books in Kindle apps as well and not just the Kindle reader.

  • Endee

    This may work if you use a Kindle, but it does not work using a kindle app in Windows 8.1 or as an iphone app. It is hugely disappointing to have 21st century reader with 18th century requirements, namely to retype manually. I have been using basic utility programs for decades, and they use code to stipulate what was copied from books in their libraries. It insets copyright information as footnotes in Word documents. If copyright is an issue for Amazon/Kindle that is a very lame excuse.

  • Andrew Nielsen

    Or, you could just open in your Windows Kindle ap, highlight what you want to copy, and press control-C.

  • Deacon Jack

    Simply Awesome! Thank you so much!

  • Brendan

    this does not work

  • Jim Carruth

    What If Your Kindle Book is Not Properly Formatted to Begin With? Try this solution:

    I bought a Kindle version of a book just so I could cut and paste parts of it into an InDesign Document for study purposes. I tried the method that Amit suggested, and found that with Kindle books that are improperly formatted to begin with, none of your highlighted material shows up in your account, even after you’ve synced it.

    There are also other problems with an improperly-formatted Kindle book, but all I wanted to do is be able to cut and paste. Most of the time you can learn this in advance by reading the reviews of frustrated readers who bought the book, and then had to call Kindle support to get a refund. Quality control, anyone? anyone? I guess there’s not much of it in the Kindle world, by all the complaints I see in the reviews section.

    Since I am using the Mac version of the Kindle app, I thought it would be a breeze to first highlight the section I wanted, then a menu pops up with four choices, one of which is “Copy.” The copy command under the File menu is disabled, and so is the keyboard shortcut ⌘-C.

    I first tried pasting into TextEdit, just to see if I was getting anything at all. I would worry about getting it into InDesign later, after I knew I could copy and paste into TextEdit.

    I was getting a tiny bit of text this way, but it was frustrating because I wasn’t getting all the text I wanted. I stumbled upon this solution, which worked well enough for me to copy and paste the entire chapter, a bit of a time, but in much larger chunks this way.

    1. Go to View > Show Display Options. Make the type size as small as it will go. Now Hide Display options.
    2. Next, click on the Multi-Column button on the top row of your Kindle app, below the row of application menus.
    3. Now you should see a huge amount of text on the screen, displayed in two columns, with very small type. Select the entire page, and when it pops up right after you’ve made your selection, push the “Copy” button.
    4. Paste it into TextEdit. It will be all jumbled up and need formatting, but at least this way you can scoop out the text and put it into a Word or other document where you can then format it.

    So my $20 bucks wasn’t wasted, and I didn’t have to call Amazon support to complain.
    I call that a win!

  • Thank you for this useful information. Appreciate it.

  • CaliforniaEd

    I use Chrome and an app called ACRExtension from GitHub.

    Works well for the copy/paste.

    The only tricky part of the instructions is the part about “copy and paste the bookmarklet code…”
    would be nice for a bit more explanation so….
    1. google ACRExtension GitHum
    2. look for the ‘raw source’ highlight. click on it and some very odd JAVA code appears.
    3. ctl-A, ctl-C to copy it all
    4. create a bookmark DON’T CLOSE IT YET
    ***** here is the tricky part *******
    5. click EDIT, then click on the URL section of the bookmark,
    remove the actual http://www./ stuff
    6. paste the code copied in #3 into the URL area.
    7. now, save it.

    to use this, open the cloud reader, CLICK ON THE BOOKMARK to activate the new copy button (you may have to do this a couple of times)

    when you highlight text and click, there will be a new copy button (if not, try clicking the bookmark, it gets stubborn sometimes).

    Hope this provides another way to do the copy/paste.
    It’s been working for me for a long time.

  • Smart

    OMG, thanks so much, this was very clear and awesomely helpful. May you be blessed with good health, or wealth, or love, or whatever it is you feel you want. teehee.

  • CaliforniaEd

    Thank you for your blessing.

    However, blessings should also be directed at the author, maybe more so since it was his/her work in 1) figuring out what to do and 2) publishing it so that human knowledge is increased, even if only a little bit ,

    I believe the author is Cosmin Cimpoi; from what little research I have done, he/she is from Romania.

    If this is not correct, please correct me.

  • I found a really easy solution to all of this. I am using the Kindle app for Mac and had originally bought some books for a research paper I was writing. So anyways, here are the steps:

    1. Highlight the text you want to copy.
    2. Additional Options will appear (See attached Image)
    3. Click More
    4. It will give you an option to Google Search it
    5. Click on the Google Option
    6. This show open up your default browser and Google search the highlighted text for you.
    7. Now all that is left is to copy you highlighted text from the google search field

    This is by far the easiest solution I’ve come across.

  • Andrew Myszkowski

    Today is Sep 8, 2015. My Kindle App for Mac allows a much simpler process:
    1. Highlight desired text
    2. Select COPY from the popup menu
    3. Paste into your desired application!

    Thank you Amazon for making it easy.
    (my screenshot may have come out tiny, but i’m certain you get it! Happy Day!)

  • Kelly

    I need a whole chapter from a Kindle book to share with students. How do I do that?

  • Rob Molina

    Dear all,

    I can not do anything about anything written here. Everything is very detailed but does not work me. Use mac, Capitan.
    For example, if I Highlight desired text, the menu do not have “copy” option.
    and if I do the best description from Jim Carruth, (it’s really perfect dicreibed) but I can do until step 3, but I can not “do 2the “Copy” button”.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c1790cb9d62a1b8e206a314087c641b2e45caf174b267c76fc5b8dbe1f1e8b2e.png
    PLEASE, see my picture.
    Many thanks for your help.

  • Massimo Todaro

    Today is 11 Dec. 2015.
    Amazon has taken away the “copy” function to probably protect the content from unauthorized use ($$$). I am a Window guy. VERY SIMPLE:
    1) take a snapshot of the Kindle page (“shift+windowkey+s” for me)
    2) paste it in OneNote
    3) right-click the picture you just pasted and select “Copy Text From Picture”
    BOOM!!! Love you Microsoft OneNote

  • Karenna

    you cannot copy if you are in CLOUD READER…. only in the Kindle for Mac of Kindle for PC…. at least, that has been my experience.

  • antipatiko morales

    So easy it’s GENIUS! Thanks bro. I maxed out on the times I was allowed to copy directly from Kindle. This solved it.

  • Good but it only works 4-5 times. Then suddelly Google opens with noting in the search window.

  • tabney0315

    THIS WORKED!! Massimo you are a genius! This is brilliant and One Note makes screen clipping text searchable.

  • isaacraythomas

    I suspect – that only works with unprotected documents.

  • That was very helpful. Thank you.

  • Ashrrs

    That pop-up does not work in many of the apps.

  • Wow! This worked GREAT!! Thanks, Amit.

  • John Mapley

    Sounds like that would probably be a breach of copyright.

  • Tina

    This is exactly the solution I used. Having paid $90 for a kindle textbook, I would assume I can at least copy paste the citation I need.

  • Jay Mac

    Most helpful Amit.

  • Jenny Mac

    Thanks, Massimo. I am designing journal for myself, and I wanted to include a small section of just writing prompts. So I bought an inexpensive kindle book of writing prompts, and for the life of me couldn’t figure out how to copy the ones I wanted. They have a lot of prompts about dark stuff like murdering and I didn’t want those in my journal. I had been taking screenshots, then pasting them into my DTP program and then saving as pdf files. Then I found an online pdf to text converter. So time consuming. Your way is so easy and it works. What I can’t figure out is why One Note has that feature, Copy Text from Picture, and advanced DTP programs don’t. Very frustrating….

  • Maurizio Pezzanera

    Hi there, I guess I’ve found an easy solution:
    1. Highlight the text
    2. From the popup menu click on “find” or “search (I’m not sure ’cause I’ve got an Italian version.)
    3. The left panel pulls out and up on the search field you’ll find your highlighted text.

    Happy copy/paste
    Cheers
    mau

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  • Ronald White

    This doesn’t work for me. I am fine to “Here . . . plain text” but how exactly do you “save/export”? In detail please. I can’t highlight text in “Notes & Marks”

  • N1 C

    Highlight the text you want, click MORE, and GOOGLE. It will enter your text into Google and there you can copy it! 😀

  • Disha Sharma

    i em a publisher and i dont anyone to copy paste the content from my buyed copied file please suggest how can i stop this ….its urgent

  • Disha Sharma

    i em a publisher and i dont anyone to copy paste the content from my buyed kindle book please suggest how can i stop this ….its urgent

  • John M

    Is your book available on Kindle? If so, there’s nothing you can do about the methods here. But bear in mind that these methods only allow a section of a book to be copied at a time, and ultimately any media like books will always be possible to copy – if all else failed you could use a photo + OCR. Better to focus on making great content that people want to buy, and DMCA’ing the worst offenders.

  • Disha Sharma

    Hi john.. i em a publisher.. i have published a kindle version of my book on amazon but i dont want that buyer can copy the complete file in word or any other document and can share with others….please help me out if anything is possible now to restrict the copypasting of content

  • Disha Sharma

    Can i prevent these practice of copying the content in my next publication

  • John M

    No.

  • John M

    You’re already getting the same copy protection as the bestselling books in the Kindle store. There’s nothing more you can do.

  • thanks.

  • Inga Andersdotter

    Believe it or not, the Google solution is the easiest one (highlighting the text, select More and Google, copy and paste the text that appears in Google search.) It is absolutely insane to have to do this. We have paid for these Kindle books, and we should be able to easily copy and paste the text. But given the situation, this is the best way.

  • Jane Lewis

    You’re a genius! Thanks!

  • Lisa Whyte

    Awesome, this works thanks :)

  • SalamaBologna

    Don’t publish.

  • Jill

    Hi Massimo,
    Can you do this with a Macbook Pro?
    Thanks,
    Jill

  • Raf

    7 steps to copy something is easy? I hate this part of Kindle.

    i sometiems have to highlight something, go to highlights, and copy from there (which copies it w/out any formatting) its incredibly frustrating

  • Ruth West

    Not on mine.

  • Ruth West

    November 2018. This does not work with Chrome or Windows 10. Highlighted passages cannot be copied.

  • Ruth West

    November 2018. This also does not work with Chrome or Windows 10. There is no ‘MORE’.

  • Ruth West

    November 2018. As noted above, this does not work with Chrome or Windows 10. There is no “More”.

  • Ruth West

    November 2018. This does not work with Chrome or Windows 10. Highlights can’t be copied.

  • Ruth West

    November 2018. This does not work without Word. I use WordPerfect and therefore don’t have the Windows Office system.

  • Ruth West

    I am desperate enough to sign up for GitHub, but googling it brought up a page with massive options. Any chance you could be more specific about getting to Step 2?

  • Ruth West

    Did you try the solution from Maurizio, below?