Kindle Tips: Kindle Fire Books that Seem to Disappear - Solution to Glitch

THE KINDLE BOOKS APP ON KINDLE FIRE HAS A GLITCH THAT CAN CAUSE BOOK TITLES TO NOT DISPLAY -- THE SOLUTION

  This dilemma of Kindle book titles seeming to disappear from Kindle Fire listings of book titles on The Cloud especially (the server library area) and also from the listing for the Device has been happening to more than a few, per reports from the forums -- and it happened to me twice in a few days.

  Forum members, as usual (in this case, 'Q' and 'Mona') came up with the answer a few weeks ago, and more and more of us are needing to use their solution.  The problem seems to have started or worsened after the last Kindle Fire upgrade.

  I think it's important that all of Amazon Kindle Support be told about this solution, because I was told by two members of Amazon Kindle Support to set my KFire back to Factory Defaults (as a 2nd or 3rd step!) which would have lost me the personal documents I had on the device.  I told them I would NOT do that, as it has always been a last-ditch step when nothing else solves the problem and that it causes more unnecessary work for customers when there is a simpler solution.

  Later we were reminded by 'affinity" on the forum that Q and Mona had provided the simple solution, and it worked like a charm for me and for MANY others on the forums.

  I called Amazon Kindle Support back to let them know there was a simple solution and this time (when I asked to be connected back with 2nd level support as before), I got Kindle Customer Support representative Ryan.   He knew about this glitch and the workaround (and started to tell me what it was before I could tell him what forumners were doing) and was surprised that other areas of Customer Support apparently did not know about it, but he said himself that the 'factory default' settings was a FINAL step that shouldn't be taken until other steps proved not to work.

 Amazon, Ryan is a prize.  I wish I could talk directly to him whenever I have questions.  It'd be nice to have someone like him in charge of letting all of Kindle Customer Support know what the latest known glitches and workarounds are.  It would help situations like the one in which one of the two free-book-forum-thread leaders was told to go back to factory defaults and then had to gather (from her computer and Amazon's servers) the personal documents that were of course 'gone' when going back to 'factory' defaults.

For the future, here is, essentially, what Q and Mona discovered.

The first clue that something is amiss is that the Cloud listing doesn't show all your books, but the Amazon servers -will- have them there.  The servers and our libraries on the servers are the 'Cloud.'

  One may or may not be able to access the Cloud directly from the Kindle Fire - doable with music and books and not doable with personal docs (at this time).

  I'll do a blog entry later on the several types of storage (and sometimes streaming) that are referred to as the Cloud, at Amazon.

When the problem with the Kindle Fire that I'm writing about occurs, our books-app "Amazon Kindle Books" is not "seeing" all the titles that are on the Cloud (our personal server library where our Kindle books are kept by Amazon) due to a software glitch that is in the Kindle App on the Kindle Fire.  Some book titles MAY be missing from the 'Device' display (the Kindle Fire itself) also.

  Mona and Q discovered that to correct this software glitch -- you should make sure that "WiFi" is ON and then go to the Gear or wheel icon at the top right of the Kindle Fire and tap that, and then choose "More" -- then go down the Settings list a bit to see "Applications" and select "ALL Applications."  Once there, you can actually select the Amazon Kindle app to be managed in this way when there is a problem.

The Steps: (a clearer way to see them)

Make sure WiFi is 'ON' when doing this)

Go to the Gear wheel at the top right when you're at the HOME Screen

Then click on:
. More,
. Settings,
. Applications
... (choosing ALL applications to view),

Select 'Amazon Kindle' and then
. Click to option to clear DATA (which clears the cache at the same time)
. Press Home at bottom left

SIT BACK (as Mona says) as it all returns to The Way It Was. :-)

No restart needed.  No need to remove the app.  No Factory Default setting involved (and never should the latter be chosen unless nothing else has worked.)

The Kindle Fire then rebuilds the Cloud and "Device" library information, and it doesn't take that long.

Always back up personal docs (as opposed to Kindle books) onto your computers.

NOWadays, we can send those personal documents to our Kindle via email addressed to the Kindle (see earlier articles cited at the bottom of this post), and Amazon will back those up for us, since they give us 5 free gigs of space for personal docs on their servers now (in addition to the 5 gigs for ALL Amazon customers for personal data in general) and they even sync those personal docs across devices too, as long as you send them to your Kindle in email across the Net, which gives them permission to store these for you.

Thanks again to Q and Mona for the steps that have helped several of us.


EARLIER ARTICLES ON PERSONAL DOCUMENTS

• How to send documents to your Kindle
• How to send WORD docs to your Kindle
• How to use Amazon's own SendtoKindle for PC
    This last one, however, results in a PDF file, which is not very readable at all on a 6" Kindle.
      Added Note
      The Amazon SendtoKindle for PC feature is different from other tools previously discussed (below):
    . sendtoreader
    . the Google Chrome add-on, sendtokindle
    . the original, Instapaper.
  
    These last three 3rd-party web-to-Kindle tools are helpful in other ways, mainly for sending documents from web pages without ads included, to your Kindle.
  

---

US: Kindle Fire  7" tablet - $199 Kindle NoTouch ("Kindle") - $79/$109 Kindle Touch, WiFi - $99/$139 Kindle Touch, 3G/WiFi - $149/$189 Kindle Keybd 3G - $189, Free, slow web Kindle DX - $379, Free, slow 3G web

UK: Kindle Basic, NoTouch - £89 Kindle Touch WiFi, UK - £109 Kindle Touch 3G/WiFi, UK - £169 Kindle Keyboard 3G, UK - £149   Keybd: w/ Free, slow 3G WEB

OTHER International Kindle NoTouch Basic - $109 Kindle Touch WiFi - $139 Kindle Touch 3G/WiFi - $189 Kindle Keybd 3G - $189   Keybd: w/ Free, slow 3G WEB

Check often: Temporarily-free recently published Kindle books
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.  Liked-books under $1
UK-Only: recently published free books, bestsellers, or £5 Max ones
  Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.

  *Click* to Return to the HOME PAGE.  Or click on the web browser's BACK button

Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

Send to Kindle

(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
If interested, you can also follow my add'l blog-related news at Facebook and Twitter
Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!

Customer workaround for user-definable folders

This is a popular blog-article which is being highlighted for newcomers and Kindle-blog edition subscribers.  During my vacation I'm including the more popular tips and guides. Kindle-blog edition subscribers will not have had these on their Kindles before and the subscription (99c per month) allows offline-review of the last 25 blog articles.

Original blog posting was May 24, 2009
In general, E-Readers that double as portable libraries really require a customizable folder feature.  Amazon recently extended the folder concept on the Kindle 2 for 1) "Archives" (which are for Amazon-purchased books already read and deleted from the Kindle but re-downloadable, free, from the customer's Amazon library area at any time via a click on the title in the Archives) and for 2) non-current periodicals.  They've always had folders for subscription newspapers and magazines (though not usually for blogs).

 The Kindle 2 (and Kindle DX) also has options for displaying 1) only books, 2) only subscriptions, 3) only "personal docs" or 4) all items.  These are also then sortable by Most Recent, Title, and Author (and searchable with the last two).

  However, as with bookstores and libraries, Kindle users have wanted user-definable dividers for categories such as Unread, Finished, Mystery, Non-Fiction, Romance, Biography, Self-improvement, etc.

  While this could make the process slower for displaying all books or less direct than finding a title or author by typing the first alpha-character and pressing the 5-way button, there's no question that categorizing books is a primary organizational tool when you have a lot of books and magazines.

Until the day that customer-defined folders are offered, customers have been recommending workarounds by using the "add-note" feature available for Kindle books.  

CUSTOMER WORKAROUND
An official Amazon Customer Service Forum post on March 5, 2009 stated:

' Kudos to Kindle Community member Bufo Calvin for this tip!
  With the ability to add notes to your Kindle 2 content and search for specific words or phrases on your Kindle 2's Home screen, you can categorize content by genre or other personalized terms.

' Open up one of your books, select Add a Note or Highlight, and enter in a word (or words) you'd like to categorize by - genres such as history, fantasy, biography, etc.  Try putting your initials or a common letter such as "x" before the word, "cshistory" or "xfantasy" for example.  Save the note you chose to enter.

' Now go back to your Home screen and type in the word you just used for your note.

' Once you've typed it, move your 5-way controller to the right and click on "Search My Items."  You'll see the book you just added the note to appear.

'  If you've added that note in multiple books, each one will appear in your search results. '

Note that this method is called "tagging" your book or "labelling" it.  This simulates folders except that it's more flexible.

  If you want a book for which two tag-words should exist together, then you can search for both words.  Only those books tagged with both words would show up in the results.

 Mainly, you won't find a word like "xwhatever" in any of your books, so this brings up only the books specifically tagged by you.

This does work for the Kindle 1 also, but the older model may take a day to index the 'tag' additions so that they're findable.  The Kindle 2 takes only a couple of minutes to do this.

 Amazon customers discuss various aspects of this in a current forum thread.  Robin McLaughlin located customer service's recommendation of Calvin's suggestion; "Laura" points out she posted this workaround at the same time and that many customers have thought about this.  "Tillamook Bay / lg" cautions that this system does not work with books done in the special Topaz format, which uses specially embedded fonts and is not searchable (nor can we change the line spacing in these).  The file extension can be .tpz or .azw1 but is essentially the Kindle format with slightly different description fields.
  UPDATE 8/17/09: I just learned that Tillamook Bay (Larry Goss) was using this workaround in September '08 based on another forum note he read earlier.

Mild shortcut for general searching:
Normally, when reading a book, you can bring up the Search box by pressing the spacebar.  If you're at the "Home" listing page, press the Enter key instead.

When typing in a keyword for a search while the 'action' on the right side says "find my items" (the default) or if it is already on the action you want ('google' or 'Wikipedia' etc), you need only press the Enter-key under the DEL key.

Otherwise, you need to 5-way over to the right and then press down on the 5-way.
  If the action for the keyword is not what you want (google, store, wiki, dictionary) then 5-way right, through some more options until you find the one you want to search. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

Send to Kindle

(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
If interested, you can also follow my add'l blog-related news at Facebook and Twitter
Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!