reading and exporting your Kindle notes and highlights

One of the great things about Kindle is that you can read and take notes, make highlights, etc. on your books using a number of different apps.  You may read books on:

1. a Kindle (of course)
2. on your desktop using Kindle for PC or Mac
   
• in this case, it's a desktop program that's great for reading and taking notes; the notes can be displayed in a sidebar.  However, I've found it less useful to exporting notes...
3. and on other Kindle Apps for Android, etc...

See here for the downloads: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_ipad_mkt_lnd?docId=1000493771

Of course this functionality would be entirely useless if I couldn't export my annotations for later use.  So here's how you can view and/or export your Kindle notes: 

For books you bought through Amazon:

1. online through Amazon's Kindle service: https://kindle.amazon.com/
• since this file is basically a webpage, you can easily just copy and paste this page into another program such as EverNote or word.
  

To export notes on items you didn't buy through Amazon (such as PDFs, etc.), it's a little more hinky. 

• You have to plug your Kindle into your computer and look for the the Kindle Folder. 
  
• Inside the Kindle Folder is a folder called "My Clippings." 
  
• From there you should be able to see the txt file that records your clippings for specific reading. 
  
• It's a txt file so it won't be well formatted, but you can go to this site: http://clippingsconverter.com/ to upload the txt file and convert your notes to a more readable format including xml and Excel (so that you can import notes into database-like files).