Ways to get Kindle words into flashcards
Amazon removed Flashcards from the Kindle in 2024. Here is what is left, what each option costs you, and where Book2Deck fits.
Between August and November 2024 Amazon removed Flashcards — the review mode built into the Kindle. Vocabulary Builder itself stayed: the device still records every word you look up, along with the sentence you met it in. What it no longer does is help you learn them.
So the words keep piling up on the device, and getting them out has become the whole problem. These are the honest options.
Do nothing
Vocabulary Builder still shows your words grouped by book, with their contexts. It costs no effort at all.
What you give up: no spaced repetition, no export, no way to look at the list from a computer. For occasional reading that may genuinely be enough.
Type the words into Anki by hand
Complete control, no tooling, and it works on any device.
It also takes several minutes per book, and the context sentence — the part that actually makes a vocabulary card stick — is the tedious bit to copy.
Upload vocab.db to a web converter
Several free converters take the database file and give back an Anki deck. They work, and some have been around for years.
Two things to know. First, they all start after the hard step: you still have to find
vocab.db on the device yourself, which on macOS means installing a file manager first.
Second, some of them do the conversion on a server, which means your reading history —
every word, every sentence, every book title — is uploaded. Whether that matters is your
call, but it is worth knowing which kind you are using.
Anki add-ons
Add-ons that read vocab.db from inside Anki are the most direct route for people already
living in Anki. They need the file too, they need Anki open, and they tie you to the
desktop application.
Book2Deck
The gap all of the above share is the first step. Book2Deck reads the database off the Kindle over USB from inside the browser — no file manager, no copying, no path to find — then lets you review, filter and deduplicate before exporting an Anki-compatible CSV.
The parsing happens in your browser. The database is never uploaded, there is no account, and nothing is installed.
Where it does not help: direct reading needs a desktop Chromium browser, and on Windows the operating system holds the USB interface, so the file has to be picked by hand there — which on Windows is easy, since the Kindle appears in Explorer. See compatibility for the current, tested picture.
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