Why use Clippings.io?
The advent of the Kindle has meant it's never been easier to create notes on your favorite books. Many of us rely on these annotations for our studies, entertainment and in our professional lives.
Clippings.io was created to help organize and manage the annotations we make on our Kindle Ereaders. Clippings.io imports your 'My Clipping.txt' file and then allows you to browse, search and tag your annotations online and export them to numerous popular file formats and upload to Evernote.
How does Clippings.io help organize your Kindle annotations?
Well, if you are familiar at all with the annotation functions on your kindle, you will already know that you can bookmark, highlight and produce notes on the book you are reading. These annotations will get saved in a text file called 'My Clippings.txt' under the documents folder. Whilst the 'My Clippings.txt' file is extremely useful, the document itself is not easily readable. Clippings.io attempts to solve this problem by importing these unstructured annotations into our database. From there you can browse, search and tag your clippings as well as exporting your clippings into Microsoft Word, Excel and Adobe PDF files or uploading to Evernote. We also allow you to choose which columns you would like to export and provide filtering and sorting functionality. This provides you the opportunity to organize your clippings into a manner that suits your specific needs.
Using your Kindle for Revision notes
It’s hard to believe but only less than a decade ago, students had to carry stacks of reference books around with them and handwrite or type their revision notes. For those of you not old enough to remember those days, not only did we end up with sore shoulders but just think how inefficient this was. We would end up with reams of coffee stained notepads which were full of barely legible notes. We then had the mad dash before an exam to consolidate these notes into something coherent. This was all before the inevitable midnight cram which I’m sure still remains the precursor to any exam. Imagine how cumbersome and difficult it was to revise under these conditions and then factor in there was no ability to search your notes or lose your school bag and all of your notes were gone. Fast forward to today and more and more students are using the Kindle to make their revision notes. It’s hardly surprising when you consider the benefits:
- You can replace all of those heavy books with one device which is weighs less than even the lightest book used to.
- Gone are the days of deciding which books you can fit into your school bag. It's mind blowing to consider you could fit every book you would ever need during your entire education on your Kindle, a device which can slip into your jacket pocket.
- To produce their revision notes students using a Kindle need merely highlight the block of text they are reading, compare this to manually handwriting or retyping your revision notes.
Clippings.io extends the Kindle's revision note making capabilities. While Kindle's annotation functions are simple and straightforward, the resulting "My Clippings.txt" file is quite difficult to read. Clippings.io fixes this by letting you choose which data to export and provides sorting and filtering tools that allow you to organize your notes according to your needs before exporting to the file format you desire or publishing to www.evernote.com. It's a subtle enhancement that can lead to a dramatic increase in productivity.