The Magic of Kindle Highlighting

How to use this undervalued feature

Chris Jennings
3 min readMay 19, 2021
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

In my mind, the Kindle is one of the most important devices of the last twenty years. I think it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the original iPod, iPhone, and countless other monumental pieces of tech. It has revolutionized the way we read books. But beyond just reading books, it’s revolutionized the way we capture information from these books.

I’m talking about the highlight function within the Kindle. How often are you using it? For that matter, how often were you highlighting the paper copies of your books? I think most people fall within one of two camps on this. Some people like to keep their paper books pristine with no markups or dog ears. Other people are all for highlighting and making as many marks in the margin as they’d like.

With the Kindle, everyone wins. You don’t have to worry about messing up your digital books with too many highlights. You can easily add notes and highlights with just a long press on a passage that interests you. So why don’t more people take advantage of this?

What is it?

Highlights on your Kindle work just like you’d highlight something in a paper book. You just find what catches your eye and long press on the text for it to be highlighted. The magical thing that…

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Chris Jennings

I write about the intersection of technology, productivity, and mindfulness. See more of my work at iterate.substack.com