Highlight, note and keep every passage you love in Lectern

Make a highlight

Tap the highlight icon in the reader's top bar to turn on highlight mode, then drag over the text you want to mark. As of version 1.31, a highlight can run across a paragraph break and works inside table cells too, so a passage spanning two paragraphs, or a row in a comparison table, becomes one highlight instead of several separate ones. After you drag, a color bar appears. Tap a color to save the highlight.

Choose a color and add a note

Tap an existing highlight to open its editor. Pick one of five colors, starting with the default yellow, and type a note underneath the color row. A color change is saved as soon as you tap it. Save stores the note text; Delete removes the highlight.

Browse your highlights

While you read, the Highlights button in the reader's bottom bar opens this book's highlights. Outside the reader there are two more ways in. Open a book's detail sheet and choose View highlights to see that book's highlights alone, or open the Stats tab, where a Highlights row appears as soon as you have at least one, grouped by book with the most recently highlighted book first.

Jump back to a highlight

Tap any highlight in the browser to jump straight back to it in the reader, at its original place in the book. This jump works for highlights made on passages in Lectern, not imported Kindle clippings.

Share a quote as a card

Long-press a highlight in the browser, or open it and tap Share, to turn the excerpt into an image card with the book title, author and the Lectern mark, then send it through the normal Android share sheet.

Export your highlights

Export highlights (Markdown) and Export highlights (JSON) include bookmarks, highlights and notes, grouped by book.

Bring highlights from Kindle

Copy the My Clippings.txt file off your Kindle, then choose Import Kindle highlights in the same Data & sync section and pick that file. Lectern matches clippings to books by title and attaches their text and notes to the matching book. They do not mark a passage in the book text or take you back to the original reading position. Plain Kindle bookmarks without text are skipped.

Restore highlights from a backup

A full Lectern backup carries your highlights along with your reading progress, settings, voice choice and catalogs. See our backup and restore guide for the complete steps on a new phone. On a new phone, first add your books to the library and wait for the scan to finish. Then restore the backup; highlights for books not yet in the library are skipped.

Highlights sync without an account

Pick a folder on Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or Nextcloud once, on each device, and Sync now in Settings carries your highlights along with your reading progress and ratings. There is no account and no server in between: the folder your cloud app already keeps in sync is the whole mechanism. On a new device, first add your books to the library and wait for the scan to finish. Then sync the folder; highlights for books not yet in the library are skipped.

Frequently asked