Amazon removed books from my Kindle

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by slm

It is, of course, your choice. I don't find the battery drain excessive when I leave the wi-fi on and I can't blame Amazon for not fixing a problem that only arises if you don't connect to the Amazon server frequently enough: your choice, but you also choose the expected consequences.

Personally I would never turn wifi on at all, if I still used Kindles (which I no longer do). I never directly download anything from built-in stores anyway; all my books go through Calibre first.

[slm]

Oddly enough, I never download books directly to the Kindle. I also put them first into Calibre.
But I often email the books from Calibre.

And, because I have Calibre available, I never leave any books on the Kindle other than the ones I'm reading.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by slm

Oddly enough, I never download books directly to the Kindle. I also put them first into Calibre.
But I often email the books from Calibre.

And, because I have Calibre available, I never leave any books on the Kindle other than the ones I'm reading.

While I like to keep a couple thousand books on my ereaders.

I almost never used email/Send-to-Kindle, precisely because I like to load a lot of books at once. Sending 50, 100 or more books via Amazon was a major pain; loading them via USB was much faster. So my Kindles were almost always offline.

I finally gave up on Kindles entirely because I didn't like the direction Amazon was taking them. That was before the vanishing books bug was introduced. There is a very remote possibility I might buy a Kindle again in the future, should some really attractive hardware be released, but unless Amazon fixes the various bugs introduced in recent years (disappearing books, reverting custom fonts and so on), the possibility will be very remote indeed.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by slm

Or--of course--to just keep wifi turned on all the time.

Or make sure the kindle has the correct time before turning wifi on.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Or make sure the kindle has the correct time before turning wifi on.

Is it certain this will prevent the sideloaded books from disappearing? Can you correct the time manually on a Kindle?

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Is it certain this will prevent the sideloaded books from disappearing?

No, but it it the most plausible explanation.

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Can you correct the time manually on a Kindle?

If it is jailbroken.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

If it is jailbroken.

So there's still no way other with a non-jailbroken Kindle than to keep wifi off or on permanently.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by slm

It is, of course, your choice. I don't find the battery drain excessive when I leave the wi-fi on and I can't blame Amazon for not fixing a problem that only arises if you don't connect to the Amazon server frequently enough: your choice, but you also choose the expected consequences.

The problem should never arise in the first place. You do remember Amazon after the fuss about removing 1984 from customer's devices? And yet here we are with Amazon merrily removing user content in contrast to a quote from the 1984 kerfluffle to the effect: "the company has vowed to never remotely destroy texts again".

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by DNSB

The problem should never arise in the first place. You do remember Amazon after the fuss about removing 1984 from customer's devices? And yet here we are with Amazon merrily removing user content in contrast to a quote from the 1984 kerfluffle to the effect: "the company has vowed to never remotely destroy texts again".

Ah, but today's Amazon is not at all the Amazon that existed a decade ago.

I still remember their suggestion to keep wifi off to save battery in the user manuals of early Kindles. Now they're pretty aggressively trying to prevent you from keeping your Kindle offline.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Or make sure the kindle has the correct time before turning wifi on.

Not an issue. When I was playing with the remote deletion of user content, the time on the device didn't matter since it was at most 4 minutes off the correct time. What did matter was having an ebook with an ASIN matching an Amazon ebook that Amazon decided I did not have a valid license for.

For instance, I picked up a book from Gutenberg and then edited the metadata during my intake process. In this process, the ASIN for the Amazon version of the PD text was added to the metadata which was used when I converted the book to KF8 and KFX. Copied them to my PW4 and no problems comparing the KF8/KFX formatting. Left the PW4 sitting around for a while—it's not my goto ereader and is mostly used when checking Kindle version of ebooks that I am formatting. Hmmm... both copies of that book have disappeared along with multiple other sideloaded books.

Bad Amazon! Where is your promise to never remotely destroy texts again?

[slm]

One possible explanation for this is that Amazon is trying to fix what it views as a mistake. Some years ago I bought a left-behind PW3G from Unclaimed Baggage. Unclaimed Baggage had signed the original user out of the kindle but otherwise left it intact--It had a recent edition of the Sunday (London) Times and a few other books.

When I registered it, those books stayed on the Kindle and stayed available to me (because the Kindle DRM uses the device serial number).

I enjoyed the Sunday Times, but I don't think it and the other books should have remained available when I changed the registration.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by slm

One possible explanation for this is that Amazon is trying to fix what it views as a mistake. Some years ago I bought a left-behind PW3G from Unclaimed Baggage. Unclaimed Baggage had signed the original user out of the kindle but otherwise left it intact--It had a recent edition of the Sunday (London) Times and a few other books.

When I registered it, those books stayed on the Kindle and stayed available to me (because the Kindle DRM uses the device serial number).

I enjoyed the Sunday Times, but I don't think it and the other books should have remained available when I changed the registration.

Amazon is not a law enforcement agency. It's not their business to mess with user content, illegal or not.

[slm]

Actually, I was more concerned about the impact on the person who left the Kindle behind. While nothing on this particular Kindle was embarrassing (unless you think reading the Sunday Times is itself incriminating), there could have been items that should not have been seen by me.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by slm

Actually, I was more concerned about the impact on the person who left the Kindle behind. While nothing on this particular Kindle was embarrassing (unless you think reading the Sunday Times is itself incriminating), there could have been items that should not have been seen by me.

It's still not any business of Amazon to mess with sideloaded content. At most, they could make it so that logging out of the account would delete everything on the device. That doesn't explain the current bug of content disappearing while still registered to the same user.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Amazon is not a law enforcement agency. It's not their business to mess with user content, illegal or not.

In fact in some countries Amazon is committing a criminal act doing this.
Even if it's accidental, a bug, it's illegal.