I highlighted 1,211 passages in one book. When I exported them from Amazon's notebook page, 283 came back cut off mid-sentence and 180 came back as a location number with no text at all, under a notice that "some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits." Amazon doesn't document the limit and you can't raise it.<p>Those highlights are my own notes in my own account, so I built a Claude Code skill that gets them back. Three unlocks made it work:<p>- The Mac Kindle app syncs a SQLite database with the exact character-precise start/end position of every highlight — no export limit applies to it.<p>- The Cloud Reader renders pages as images that can be captured via canvas and OCR'd locally with Apple Vision (free, on-device, no tokens).<p>- Known positions turn recovery from transcription into arithmetic: find the known prefix, cut to the known length. Recovered text lands within 0-2 characters of the position ruler (median residual 0-1).<p>Four books so far: 2,432 highlights, 815 of them export-blocked — all recovered, verbatim, location-cited, into one Markdown file per book.<p>Constraints, honestly: macOS only (AppleScript browser control, Apple Vision OCR, the Mac Kindle app's data files), your own logged-in Chrome, and Claude Code to drive it. It reads only your own annotations on your own account — no DRM is touched, and the output is for your personal notes.<p>Build story: <a href="https://baowebdev.substack.com/p/how-to-take-back-your-kindle-highlights" rel="nofollow">https://baowebdev.substack.com/p/how-to-take-back-your-kindl...</a>