In the past two months, I spent most of the time on Tidyverse and Harry Potter books and finally I completed all of them lately, feeling appreciated in the quarantine life.

These two different things connected together when I was looking for ways to export Kindle Vocabulary Builder, which is a vocabulary list consists of the words I look up in the kindle.

Why Export Kindle Vocabulary Builder?

You may decide to export Kindle Vocabulary Builder for the following two reasons. First, Kindle only keeps up to a maximum of 2000 words, so your new words after 2000 will not be displayed in Kindle. Exporting and cleaning the vocabulary could help you backup it on a regular basis and keep reading.

Second, exporting the vocabulary out of kindle actually allows you to learn the vocabulary in a more efficient way. One of the features in Kindle Vocabulary Builder is that it keeps a record of the context (“usage”) every time you look up a word. That means each vocabulary keeps your lookup frequency. For example, below is the lookup frequency for my vocabulary from Harry Potter books.

It shows that most of the vocabulary (77%) were only looked up once across seven Harry Potter books. Thus, I don’t think it makes sense to study this vocabulary. However, you can not distinguish this vocabulary in Kindle Vocabulary Builder, making it less efficient.

In other words, what I wanted is to a list of the vocabulary with lookup frequency so that I can prioritize my study.

How to Export Kindle Vocabulary Builder?

First, you need to get the file called “vocab.db” from Kindle via USB. Just search “vocab.db” within Mac Finder or Windows and copy it.

Second, this is the tricky part, you need to read the data in “vocab.db” through either a Database software (e.g., SQLite) or a programming software (e.g., R or Python). In my case, I used R to read the data and wrote a few lines of code.

Anyway, in the end I got what I need and export Kindle Vocabulary Builder to an Excel.

Since not everyone has the knowledge of database or programming, I’m thinking of making a free web application tool so that everyone can upload their Kindle Vocabulary Builder file and download it as an Excel. In the meantime, if you need to export your Kindle Vocabulary Builder, just send me your “vocab.db” file to my email (henrywangnl@gmail.com) and I can then send you the Excel.

Now you can try it for free!

Create Anki Flashcards with Kindle’s Vocabulary List

Hiroyo Saito made a great video to explain how to make Anki Flashcards with the Kindle Vocabulary file you export from my tool. Please check it out if you are interested!