Export Your Highlights

Your highlights are yours to take. Any time you like, you can download your whole library — every highlight, the source it came from, your notes and your tags — in the format that suits what you want to do with it: a single CSV file that opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets, or a zip of Markdown files, one per source, ready for Obsidian, Logseq, Apple Notes or any folder of plain text. Both work whether or not your subscription is active.

If you’d rather have your highlights keep arriving in Notion on their own, see Sync to Notion.

CSV

Where to Find It

• Web — go to Settings → Exports and, in the Download a copy card, click Download on the CSV row. The button reads Preparing… while the file is built, a “CSV downloaded.” message confirms it, and the file lands in your browser’s downloads.
• iPhone or Android — open Settings, tap Exports under Highlights, then tap CSV under Download a copy. The share sheet opens, so you can save the file to Files, send it to yourself, or hand it to another app.
• AI assistants — if you’ve connected an MCP client, it can call the export_highlights tool to fetch the same CSV as text, one page at a time.

Every export is a full snapshot of your library at that moment — there is no “only what’s new since last time”. Download again whenever you want a fresh copy.

What’s in the File

One row per highlight, grouped by source. Only your own highlights are included: popular passages and the ones Becoming’s AI surfaces aren’t yours, so they stay out. The columns, in order:

Column	What it holds
highlight	The highlighted text.
source_title	The title of the book, article, video or podcast.
source_author	Its author or creator.
source_type	Book, Article, Video or Podcast.
source_url	The source’s web address, when it has one.
source_origin	How the source came into Becoming — Kindle, Readwise, X, YouTube, a photo, by hand… Blank when we don’t know.
location	Where the highlight sits in its source: the Kindle location, the paragraph number in an article, the second in a video or podcast, or the post’s timestamp on X. A plain number, no label; 0 when there is none.
deep_link_url	A link straight to the passage, for videos, X posts and Play Books. Blank otherwise.
note	Your notes on the highlight. Several notes are separated by a blank line.
tags	Your tags, plus the AI tags you’ve confirmed, separated by commas.
added_at	When the highlight entered Becoming, as a UTC date and time.
language	The language of the highlight.
translated	true if Becoming translated the highlight, otherwise false.
highlight_id	Becoming’s ID for the highlight.
source_id	Becoming’s ID for the source.

Note

added_at is when the highlight arrived in Becoming — imported, synced or pasted — not when you highlighted it in the book. Becoming doesn’t keep the original highlighting date.

The column names are always in English, whatever language you use Becoming in, so a spreadsheet formula or a script keeps working if you switch.

If Accents Look Wrong in Excel

The file is UTF-8 and carries the marker Excel needs to read accents correctly when you double-click it. If you still see characters like é where an é should be, import it instead of opening it: in Excel, go to Data → From Text/CSV, pick the file, and choose UTF-8 as the file origin. Numbers and Google Sheets read it correctly as is.

Markdown

The Markdown export gives you one plain-text file per source, with the source’s details up top and the highlights underneath. It’s the format to choose when you want your highlights inside a notes app rather than a spreadsheet. You can export the whole library as a zip, or a single source as one .md file.

Where to Find It

• Web — for the whole library, go to Settings → Exports and, in the Download a copy card, click Download on the Markdown row; a “Markdown downloaded.” message confirms it, and the zip lands in your browser’s downloads. For a single source, open the Library, click the ⋯ menu (Source actions) on the source’s row or card — or on the source’s own page — and choose Export as Markdown.
• iPhone or Android — for the whole library, open Settings, tap Exports under Highlights, then tap Markdown under Download a copy; the share sheet opens with the zip, so you can save it to Files or hand it to another app. For a single source, open it from the Library, tap ⋯ in the header, and choose Export as Markdown — the share sheet opens with the .md file.
• AI assistants — if you’ve connected an MCP client, it can call the get_source_markdown tool to fetch one source as the same Markdown file. The whole-library zip isn’t offered over MCP; an assistant fetches sources one at a time.

What’s in the Zip

The zip is named becoming-highlights-YYYY-MM-DD.zip, after the day you exported it. Inside, sources are sorted into folders — books/, articles/, videos/ and podcasts/, only the ones you have something in — with one .md file per source, named after its title:

becoming-highlights-2026-09-28.zip
├── README.md
├── books/
│   ├── Un Mundo Feliz.md
│   └── Deep Work.md
└── articles/
    └── Naval on X.md

The file name is the title as it appears in your library — only characters a file system won’t accept (slashes, colons, question marks, quotes and the like) become -, and very long titles are cut at 120 characters. Two sources with the same title get -2, -3 and so on at the end of the name.

At the top level sits a README.md with your email address, the export date, a count of sources and highlights, and a line naming the folder layout. It also reminds you that each export is a full snapshot of your library at that moment — there is no “only what’s new since last time”.

Inside Each File

Each file opens with a block of YAML frontmatter — the metadata notes apps like Obsidian read as properties. Fields that aren’t known for a source are left out rather than left blank.

Field	What it holds
title	The source’s title.
author	Its author or creator, when known.
type	book, article, video or podcast.
origin	How the source came into Becoming — kindle, x, youtube… — when known.
language	The source’s language, when known.
url	The source’s web address, when it has one.
asin	Amazon’s identifier, for Kindle books.
becoming_url	The source’s page in Becoming.
highlights	How many highlights the file holds.
exported_at	When the file was exported.

After the frontmatter comes the source itself:

• The title as a heading, with the author in italics under it.
• Highlights — one bullet per highlight, in reading order. When Becoming knows where a highlight sits, the bullet ends with a link to that spot: a Kindle link that opens the Kindle app at that location, a video link that jumps to the exact second, or an X link that opens the post; when there is a location but no link to build, the bullet ends with the location on its own. Your tags and notes on the highlight sit underneath it as Tags: and Note: sub-bullets — tags are written as #hashtags, so Obsidian and Logseq pick them up.
• Notes — the notes you wrote on the source itself, not on a particular highlight. The CSV has no room for these; the Markdown export keeps them.

The headings and labels follow the language of your account, so a Spanish account gets Spanish headings. The frontmatter keys stay in English whatever the language, so a notes app reads the same properties from every export.

As with the CSV, only your own highlights are included, there is no cover image, and there is no highlighting date: Becoming records when a highlight arrived, not when you marked it in the book.

Using It in Obsidian, Logseq or Apple Notes

• Obsidian — unzip the export into a folder inside your vault. The frontmatter shows up as Properties at the top of each note, so you can search and sort by author, type or origin. Keep the export in its own folder: the next time you export, delete that folder and unzip the new one in its place, and nothing else in your vault is touched.
• Logseq — unzip the export into your graph’s pages/ folder. Each source becomes a page.
• Apple Notes on a Mac — unzip the export, then in Notes choose File → Import to Notes and pick the folder. Each file becomes a note.

If you use Notion, you can skip the zip: Sync to Notion keeps a Notion database filled with your highlights. Syncing straight to Obsidian is coming; for now, the export is the way in.

After Your Subscription Lapses

Exports don’t go away when your subscription does. On the web, Settings shows only the Account view once your access has lapsed, and the Download a copy card sits there, above the danger zone, with the same CSV and Markdown downloads. On iPhone and Android, Settings → Exports stays open too, with the same downloads.

Limits

You can export your whole library a few times an hour, and single sources more often than that. If you hit the limit, wait a little and try again — the file will be identical unless you’ve added something in between.

If your library is very large — tens of thousands of highlights — the instant download may be too big to prepare. Email hello@usebecoming.com and we’ll send you the file.

See Also

• Sync to Notion — keep your highlights in a Notion database
• Delete Your Account — download your highlights before you go
• Sources & Highlights — how Becoming organizes what you read
• MCP Tools Reference — every tool an AI assistant can use