Kindle Vocabulary Builder
Vocabulary Builder keeps every word you looked up on the Kindle and gives you no export button. The words sit in a SQLite file called vocab.db on the device itself. Here is how to pull them out with their sentences, and what to do about everything you read that is not on a Kindle.
Plug the Kindle into your Mac with a USB cable and it mounts as a drive. The file is at system/vocab.db, and system is hidden, so press ⇧⌘. in Finder to reveal it. Copy the file somewhere else before you touch it.
It is an ordinary SQLite database. WORDS holds the words, LOOKUPS holds the sentence each one was found in, and BOOK_INFO holds the titles.
macOS ships with sqlite3, so nothing needs installing. Point it at your copy of the file:
sqlite3 -csv vocab.db \
"SELECT w.stem, l.usage FROM WORDS w
JOIN LOOKUPS l ON l.word_key = w.id;" > kindle-words.csvThat gives you a CSV with the word in the first column and the sentence it came from in the second, which is exactly the shape Anki wants on import.
Swap w.stem for w.word if you would rather keep the inflected form you actually met.
Amazon has never shipped an export, so the file is the only route. Worth knowing before you rely on it: the list only records lookups made on the Kindle itself.
Everything you read somewhere else is invisible to it. Papers, PDFs, websites, subtitles, an ebook open in a desktop reader. For most people that is the majority of their reading.
Leafy is the same idea pointed at a Mac screen. Press ⌥A, box the word, and it saves the word together with the sentence it appeared in, which is the pairing that made the Kindle list useful in the first place.
From there it exports to Anki, CSV, Excel, JSON or PDF, with the card layout previewed before the file is written. Same data as the Kindle list, over more of your reading.
Leafy does not import that file today. The sqlite line above is the way to do it, and it takes about a minute. If enough people want the import built in, say so on Discord and it goes on the list.
Your library stays on your Mac. No account, no sync server, no ads. The privacy page spells out what is sent and what is kept.
Free while Leafy is in beta. One download, no account, macOS 14 and up.
Download for MacAlso worth a look: building an Anki deck out of what you read, why looked up words never stick, or scanned PDFs.