Overcoming the Kindle Clipping Limit
The Kindle is a wonderful reading device, unfortunately it has some arbitrarily imposed limitations that severely impact its usability for serious study or research work.
One of the most limiting aspects, is the limit on “clippings”. These are the exported text highlights that you make when reading a book. If you find yourself reading a book for an assignment or article and have been fastidiously making highlights of important sections, you may very disappointed when you go to retrieve those highlights from the “My Clippings.txt” file stored on your Kindle. Specifically, you may find this:
==========
Really Good Book: But You Can’t Clip! (Example Author)
– Highlight Loc. 7895-99 | Added on Friday, April 03, 1970, 08:13 AM
<You have reached the clipping limit for this item>
==========
Really Good Book: But You Can’t Clip! (Example Author)
– Highlight Loc. 7900-7905 | Added on Friday, April 03, 1970, 08:14 AM
<You have reached the clipping limit for this item>
==========
This is a far cry from what you were probably expecting to find, which was the actual passage that you highlighted!
So, here are some helpful links for enabling full clipping functionality for books that you have purchased:
- kindle clipping limit (293)
- you have reached the clipping limit for this item (126)
- kindle copy limit (112)
- clipping limit kindle (83)
- kindle you have reached the clipping limit for this item (61)
- you have reached the publisher\'s copy limit set for this title (57)
- kindle clippings limit (34)
- kindle clipping limit reached (30)
- <you have reached the clipping limit for this item> (26)
- you have reached the clipping limit for this item kindle (26)
April 1, 2012 – it does not make any sense for clippings to be limited on a Kindle. People buy Kindles so they don’t have to lug heavy books around. College students need to do a lot of underlining while studying so why would highlighting be limited? If there is no limit, obviously, in the hardcover or paperback reference book, why should the publisher limit highlighting on the Kindle version of the same book?
Hi Florin,
Thank you for your comment about the Kindle clipping/highlighting limit. I agree with you 100%! As you and I have both experienced, it can be very frustrating 🙁 Hopefully Amazon will eventually encourage/force publishers to allow unlimited highlighting on the Kindle.
Best regards,
-JD
Any reason why there is a limit for the number of clippings? I am quite disappointed of such limitation!
They limit clips and copies, because they know some people will just buy the more expensive physical books when they’re up against a deadline. It should be illegal for them to do that, because we bought the Kindle version of the books. We should own them completely. They don’t exactly make it obvious that these limits exist, until after you start working on a project, then you’re screwed if you need the book for research. Most of the companies that pretend to care about students (Amazon, Apple, ScribD etc), really just exploit them.
Hi Florin,
I agrees with you. It is really frustrating to see the copy limit warning on Kindle. I tried a lot of online Override solution to my kindle and it’s not working. However, the stupidest way worked.
You just select the paragraph and right click it. Instead of select “Copy”, you select “Search in the Book”. Then the paragraph that you want to copy will appears in the searching bar. Then you “Select all” from the search bar and copy+paste to somewhere else.
I’m trying learn to read Spanish.
I purchased a dozen novels en español, so that I could copy sentences or paragraphs into ChatGPT, where it would translate for me, and provide me with a grammatical lesson, pointers, etc.
This method has been fun and was working great… and then BAM, 10% through my book, the Kindle app suddenly stops letting me copy sentences. 😖