How to highlight an EPUB without a Kindle
You own the book. You just want to mark a passage and find it again later. Here's how to highlight an EPUB in your browser — no Kindle, no emailing files to Amazon, no conversion.
Sending your own EPUB to a Kindle is a small ordeal. You email it in or plug the device into a cable, wait for the conversion, and then discover the awkward part: the highlights you make on that converted copy don't travel the way store-bought highlights do. Amazon's highlight sync and export were built around books you bought from Amazon.
If the goal is marking up a book you already own, the browser is a simpler place to do it. The file opens as-is, the highlight lands where you put it, and nothing goes through anyone's mail server.
Highlight an EPUB in three steps
- Open the reader — no account, no conversion step.
- Drag your .epub in. It's stored in your browser, on your device.
- Select any passage and pick a color. Add a note if you want to say more.
Why highlights in a reflowable book are tricky
An EPUB has no fixed pages. Change the font size and every line moves, which is exactly where naive highlighting falls apart — the mark drifts a paragraph off, or vanishes.
ReadHere anchors each highlight to a position in the book's own text rather than to a spot on the screen. Bump the type up two sizes, rotate your phone, switch to the sepia theme: the highlight stays on the same words. The same anchoring is what lets your reading position survive a device change.
What you get around the highlight
- Four colors. Enough to separate "important" from "disagree" from "look this up" without building a color system you'll forget by chapter three.
- Notes tied to the passage. The comment stays attached to the sentence that prompted it.
- One sidebar per book. Every highlight and note in a scannable list — click any of them to jump back to the spot.
- A per-book journal. Somewhere to think in paragraphs, separate from the margin notes.
- The same tools on PDFs. Your textbooks and papers don't need a second app.
Keeping the highlights
Free, everything is saved locally on the device you're reading on — fast, private, and available offline. The tradeoff is that clearing your browser's site data clears it too.
Pro ($10/yr) backs the library and its highlights up to your own Google Drive (drive.file scope, so the app only ever touches the ReadHere folder it creates) and syncs them to your other devices. Cancel and the files stay in your Drive — there's nothing to be locked out of.
Related: annotate an EPUB online free, a Kindle alternative for your own PDFs.
Common questions
Why can’t I highlight my sideloaded EPUB on Kindle properly?
Kindle converts a sideloaded EPUB into its own format on the way in. Highlights you make on the converted copy live inside that copy, and Amazon’s highlight sync and export are built around books bought from the store — not files you sent yourself.
Do I have to convert my EPUB to read it here?
No. ReadHere opens the .epub file as-is, in your browser. Nothing is converted, emailed, or uploaded on the free tier.
Will my highlights survive a font-size change?
Yes. Highlights are anchored to positions in the book’s text, not to pixels on a page, so changing the font, size, or screen width keeps every highlight on the right words.
Can I get my highlights on my phone too?
With Pro ($10/yr) your library and highlights back up to your own Google Drive and sync across devices. On the free tier they stay on the device where you made them.
Highlight your EPUB now
Drag the file in, mark what matters — free, private, no conversion.