Your Kindle books, highlights, and notes are now available online in one place. Personal notebooks are coming in early 2023.
For a long time, if you wanted to read your Kindle books online (on your computer, in a web browser), you were using Kindle Cloud Reader – an old-looking web app that allowed you to download books for offline reading, and available at read.amazon.com.
When it comes to your Kindle notes and highlights, since 2019 they were available online at read.amazon.com/notebook.
The problem is that these two parts of your Kindle library were not linked to each other, and looked like belonging to different platforms.
Then, in summer 2021, Amazon redesigned the Kindle Cloud Reader, which now resembles mobile Kindle apps for Android or iPad/iPhone, and belongs to the same interface as highlights.
Finally, just a few days ago, on September 15, 2022, the Kindle books and notes got a common landing page, which for unregistered users looks like the screenshot below and is available at read.amazon.com/landing.
The fact that the unification of the web-based Kindle services was finished at the time of announcing Kindle Scribe is not a coincidence.
Amazon’s newest top-shelf e-paper device is intended for active reading. It comes with a battery-free stylus and handwriting support. Personal notes become an even more important part of the Kindle platform.
On the Kindle Scribe, you will be able not only to make handwritten annotations in the books you are reading. You will also have access to a number of templates that you would use for journaling, doodling, or to-do lists.
As the Kindle Scribe press release says: “All notebooks are automatically saved and backed up to the cloud for free, and, coming in early 2023, they will also be accessible via the Kindle app.”
It means that in a few months the personal notebooks from your Kindle Scribe will be at least available in the web-based Kindle app, as Amazon now calls the Kindle online access point. Will the notebooks come to mobile Kindle apps for Android and iPad as well? It’s possible, but it probably won’t happen together with the web.
Did you know you can use the Apple Pencil with your Kindle app on the iPad? You won’t be able to hand write the notes over the text, like you can do on the Kindle Scribe. However, once you open a Note, you can use Apple Pencil in the textarea.
So, from now on, you get a single, easy, unified online access to your Kindle content. All you need is a web browser. Go to read.amazon.com, sign in with your Amazon credentials, and you will see:
- Kindle books – they are available in the left sidebar, in the section called “Library.” Please keep in mind that only the books you downloaded from the Kindle Store will appear here. Your personal documents are available only in mobile Kindle apps. A dedicated url is read.amazon.com/kindle-library.
- Kindle notes – they are available in the “Notes & Highlights” section. A dedicated url is read.amazon.com/notebook. I believe Kindle Scribe originated notebooks will also land in this section.
It’s worth noting that, thanks to the web-app redesign, it’s now easier to read and manage Kindle books online. The reading interface is the same as in the Kindle app for iOS or Android.
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