Not all e-books that you download will be read for pleasure. If you're studying text on your Kindle, it can be helpful to highlight specific phrases or insert your own notes. The Kindle 2 and Kindle DX let you do that with the Clippings and Notes functions.
Cutting Kindle clippings
A bookmark is simply a marker you place on a page so that you can find that page later. A clipping, on the other hand, is a selection of text that you can save to a “My Clippings” file. After you create a clipping, you can read it later on your Kindle (even if you delete the content it came from). You can also copy it to your computer via a USB cable.
To clip selected text, follow these steps:
Press the Menu button.
Select Highlight.
Move the five-way controller to position the cursor to the beginning of the content you want to clip, click the controller, move the cursor across the content to highlight it, and click the controller again.
That’s it. The selection is added to your My Clippings file. To view your clippings, press Home to go to your Home screen and look in your content list for a file called My Clippings. Each clipping is preceded by a note that identifies its source, the original location of that source, and when the clipping was added.
Taking notes with a Kindle
Notes are comments you type and save while you’re reading. They're similar to the notes traditionally written in the margins of pages in a printed book.
To type a note, use the five-way controller to position the cursor to the left of the word or sentence about which you want to write a note. Then just start typing your note. A text box appears with a Save Note button to press when you’re done.
When you’ve created a note, you see a superscripted number beside the text. You can view the note later by using the controller to highlight the superscripted number. This makes the note box appear in the lower part of the screen. Clicking the controller opens the note box for you to edit or delete the note.