Books slipping out of collections into uncollected or hyperspace.

[Gharpalus]

I apologize for the length of this post. However, I think people should know about problems with collections and know about the possibility that even on the Amazon cloud books may slip out of collections into hyperspace.

I own the following Kindle units which all are having problems with books slipping out of collections and going into the uncollected category: Kindle Paperwhite; Kindle Paperwhite Signature: 3 Oasis units; 2 Kindle scribe units. According to Amazon cloud I have 5470 books that were purchased from Amazon from 2011 until now. I accumulated so many books and Amazon devices because I am 82 years old and have disabilities and am mostly homebound. Reading is a big part of my life and I worry that books may vanish.

Some time ago I noticed that my oasis units after being charged died within a day or two and decided that possibly their batteries were going bad. I purchased a Kindle Paperwhite and managed to get a reasonable part of my library downloaded onto it but had some problems with books slipping out of the collections in which they belonged and going into the uncollected category. Finally, I got the number of books in the uncollected category down to a low number and was able to use the device. After a few weeks all of the books that were in uncollected vanished from uncollected and apparently went back into their proper collections.

A few days ago I purchased a Kindle Paperwhite signature and began downloading books collection by collection. Books began rapidly slipping out of collections and going into the uncollected category. I would manually move them back into the proper collections and then see them only slip away into uncollected again.

Eventually I began using my Windows 10 computer and looking at books and collections through Kindle content–on the cloud. Books that had slipped into the uncollected category on my Kindle Paperwhite signature were according to Kindle content all in their proper collections on the Amazon cloud servers

I turned on all of my Kindle devices listed above and found that they all had books in the uncollected category–that is books that had slipped from their collections into uncollected even though the Amazon servers in the cloud insisted that the books are in their proper collections. Books by a few authors always seemed to leak out of collections while most books that leaked differed from unit to unit. (For some reason, books by Kate Elliott were just about the most common ones that slipped out of collections–even though they were purchased individually at different times.) Repeated synchronizations of the Kindle devices did not fix the problem nor did repeated reboots. It’s as though my collections are porous and things just leak away from them.

I battled through the Amazon system to reach a person in the US Kindle technical support section but after thoroughly describing the problems and getting her to understand that they were occurring on seven different devices, the Amazon phone line went dead. Repeated the process and got another person from the US technical support for Amazon Kindle and at her request took photographs of the uncollected books on each of the seven devices and emailed them to her. Amazon phone line again disconnected. I got another person at Amazon finally but was told I could not get back to the previous people I have spoken to–in other words I was back to square one.

Asked for a supervisor. The supervisor apparently saw my email with the photos of uncollected items on seven Kindles and said that I should try re-creating new collections because possibly the problem was that my collections were old. This was a mind-boggling suggestion. If books can slip out of collections on Amazon devices because the collections were made a few years ago, can purchases possibly disappear from the cloud so the books need to be repurchased? Some of my book purchases are years old.

I spent an entire day battling with this issue. What makes it even worse is that I have limited use of my hands because I am disabled and am covered under the Americans With Disabilities Act. Now I have to go through the lengthy process of re-creating collections. For just one of my collections, I went to 45 different screens and selected everything on each and moved books into a new collection. This was painful.

I finally did what I should’ve done earlier today rather than waste time with Amazon. I googled the problem and found that other people have had books that slip out of collections and that sometimes people find that certain Amazon books keep slipping while others stick in their proper collections. How do I keep books from "falling out" of Kindle collections. (amazonforum.com) I have seen some other posts about this problem. I posted in the Kindle part of Reddit, and several people reported problems with books slipping out of collections

If it is a known issue that collections only last for a certain length of time, Amazon should tell people so that they can re-create collections before things start to go wrong. Amazon should provide a simple way to move all books within a collection over to a new collection with just a few mouse clicks in Kindle content.

I went through all 45 screens on the Kindle cloud server for authors with the last name starting with D-K and copied all to a new collection. The old collection had 1106 books according to Amazon cloud server, but the new collection has only 1040 books according to cloud. Quite a significant loss.

Once I finished creating the new collection, I synchronized my Kindle Paperwhite Signature with the cloud and saw many of the uncollected books leave uncollected and go into the new collection and boost the total to slightly below 1000 in the new collection on the Kindle unit. Repeated synchronizations of the Paperwhite did not boost the number in the new collection on the Paperwhite. A series of reboots each time resulted in several D-K books going into uncollected. After each reboot I manually put such books into the new collection and currently have a grand total of 1009 books in the new collection on the Kindle Paperwhite. Somewhat distressing is that I checked some of the D-K books that went into uncollected and found that the Amazon cloud stated that the books already were in the new D-K collection. I tried several synchronizations and a reboot of one of my Kindle scribe units and ended up with only 989 books in the new D-K collection. Uncollected had 151 books, with enough of them being from D-K to suggest that manually putting them into the new collection in which they already are on the cloud might result in approximately 1000 books in the new collection. Synchronizations apparently can’t get the number of books in the new collection to be much above 1000 on Kindle units even though the cloud says that the new collection has 1040 of the 1106 books that are in the old collection.

In summary,
1. Old collections may suddenly start to leak like crazy.
2. New collections may also possibly leak–only way I could really know for sure is if I deleted the old collection. However, I can’t delete it because it has books that the cloud did not copy over into the new collection.
3. Synchronizations aren’t very effective for straightening up collection problems.
4. I greatly wish I had kept a database or spreadsheet and entered every purchase into it because I no longer trust the Amazon cloud and certainly don’t trust synchronization to always fix things.
5. Above all, if at all possible, download onto your Amazon devices every book and I mean every that you buy from Amazon. My Kindle scribe units fortunately have enough horsepower so that I can download all purchased books onto it–well at least all purchased books that the cloud makes available.
6. Amazon should go back to the practice of listing purchased books in its invoices rather than requiring that the user search the Amazon cloud to find out what books were purchased. Searching the cloud may not find books that slipped into hyperspace. Amazon manages to list on invoices each and every non-book item that people purchase, why not revert to listing purchased books on the invoice?
7. I suspect that part of my problems is that the entire Kindle ecosystem is designed to handle much fewer than libraries of 5000 purchased books. If this is correct, Amazon should give some indication of the number of books that can be handled instead of talking about how one can have thousands of books on their units. (Amazon webpage for Paperwhite Signature states “More books in more places – Store thousands of titles, then take them all with you.”

[Sirtel]

Just a note - if you want to back up your Kindle books outside the Amazon ecosystem, downloading them all to a Kindle is not the way to do it. Kindle books are keyed to only work on the device they were downloaded to and they don't work on any other device, so you can never copy them anywhere else.

For making a proper personal backup one needs to download the books to a computer and remove the DRM.

It's possible I did not understand you well enough and there is another reason you downloaded all the books to your Scribes, not backup. If so, I stand corrected.

[jhowell]

I gave up on using Kindle collections a long time ago due to their unreliability. I own multiple Kindle devices and also read on my phone and tablet. I found that comparing the count of books in each collection across devices and on the web site showed that there were always discrepancies.

These days I categorize my e-book library using calibre and avoid using any of the Kindle book organizing features.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by jhowell

I gave up on using Kindle collections a long time ago due to their unreliability.

Yes, I did the same when I still used Kindles. There were just too many bugs. As I had all my books organized in Calibre, I didn't need Kindle collections all that much. I do use collections on my Kobos, but only because they're created and maintained automatically via Calibre, without any manual work on my part. Otherwise I wouldn't bother.

[FacetiousKnave]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Yes, I did the same when I still used Kindles. There were just too many bugs. As I had all my books organized in Calibre, I didn't need Kindle collections all that much. I do use collections on my Kobos, but only because they're created and maintained automatically via Calibre, without any manual work on my part. Otherwise I wouldn't bother.

Could you please elaborate on how Kobos automatically create collections and what criteria the system follows to generate them? I personally like to create collections by author, but my Kindle app shows such a massive discrepancy (2,548 books showed as uncollected) with the way I have grouped my books on "Manage Content and Devices," so I just gave up on Amazon.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by FacetiousKnave

Could you please elaborate on how Kobos automatically create collections and what criteria the system follows to generate them? I personally like to create collections by author, but my Kindle app shows such a massive discrepancy (2,548 books showed as uncollected) with the way I have grouped my books on "Manage Content and Devices," so I just gave up on Amazon.

Why would you want to create collections by author? Both Kindles and Kobos can sort books by author.

That said, you can create collections on your Kobo by any calibre column you want. You just enter the column name in the Kobo driver settings in Calibre and when you send the books to your Kobo from Calibre, they'll be sorted into collections automatically.

For example, I use the custom column named "shelves" for my Kobo collections - it has the genre of the book and a couple of other custom values. So the books on my Kobos are in collections by those values. I guess you can use the author column for collections if you want.

[FacetiousKnave]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Why would you want to create collections by author? Both Kindles and Kobos can sort books by author.

That said, you can create collections on your Kobo by any calibre column you want. You just enter the column name in the Kobo driver settings in Calibre and when you send the books to your Kobo from Calibre, they'll be sorted into collections automatically.

For example, I use the custom column named "shelves" for my Kobo collections - it has the genre of the book and a couple of other custom values. So the books on my Kobos are in collections by those values. I guess you can use the author column for collections if you want.

Thanks for clarifying. It seems that the way Kobo works is extremely practical and customizable. However, I am still undecided on whether to buy a Kobo or a Boox Go Color 7. In terms of aesthetics, I am very interested in the latter, but considering the price and not having been able to try it keeps me indecisive.

As for your initial question, I like organizing my library by author for two specific reasons: first, I do not read based on genres or themes, but rather based on writers whose work I follow or study; second, being able to visualize the collection of authors helps me know what books I have and which ones I still need.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by FacetiousKnave

Thanks for clarifying. It seems that the way Kobo works is extremely practical and customizable. However, I am still undecided on whether to buy a Kobo or a Boox Go Color 7. In terms of aesthetics, I am very interested in the latter, but considering the price and not having been able to try it keeps me indecisive.

Well, I'm obviously the wrong person to offer an opinion on which of them to buy (as I'm a Kobo owner), but if integration with Calibre is important to you, there's nothing out there that's better than a Kobo reader. That's one area where Kobos surpass other brands. A Boox may be better in terms of hardware and flexibility (being Android), but you won't get that integration with Calibre you get with a Kobo device. It's your decision what is the most important feature to you, of course.

In days of yore this was not actually true, as you could install Calibre Companion on your Android device and get the same integration. But unfortunately CC has been abandoned.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by FacetiousKnave

Could you please elaborate on how Kobos automatically create collections and what criteria the system follows to generate them? I personally like to create collections by author, but my Kindle app shows such a massive discrepancy (2,548 books showed as uncollected) with the way I have grouped my books on "Manage Content and Devices," so I just gave up on Amazon.

The problem with Kindles is that they don't allow access to the database. because of this, there is no way to create collections using calibre. You would have to create the collections manually and populate them manually. This is on a Kindle that's not jailbroken.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Why would you want to create collections by author? Both Kindles and Kobos can sort books by author.

Because the book list would be a lot larger when you have multiple books by the same author.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Because the book list would be a lot larger when you have multiple books by the same author.

Well, yes, but you can browse in the Author tab and see all your authors without the list getting too huge. The Author tab on a Kobo is basically the same as collections by authors would be, unless I'm missing something.

I no longer remember if you could do this on a Kindle.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Well, yes, but you can browse in the Author tab and see all your authors without the list getting too huge. The Author tab on a Kobo is basically the same as collections by authors would be, unless I'm missing something.

Pretty much yes. On the author tab, you will see the author name sorted by last name, first name, # of books or recent and the number of books which you can tap on to open the books list for that author. Personally, I prefer to use search by author instead of the author list since it currently runs to ~170 pages (1692 individual authors).

One friend of mine still has collections on his Kobo Glo for authors and series for reasons that seem to be little more than that's how they've always done it since I originally helped him set it up close to a decade back.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

I no longer remember if you could do this on a Kindle.

Kindle does not group by author, so the list is the same length as number of books. It's pretty useless.

As for collections, it is best to use them sparingly, and use Search (and calibre) instead.

Managing collections on Kindle does not scale up very well, making modifications can take a couple of minutes if they are larger than a couple of hundred. It used to be Kindle will only show you 1000; probably that is still the case.

There is a 'convenience' feature that lets you 'download all items'. in a given collection. For fun and curiosity, I tried it out a couple of weeks ago with a collection I have with about 300 books in it. It took 3-4 hours to download them (this with my Scribe over 5GHz band), and of course hours more to index that (I think the two activities probably interfere with each other). I finally gave up and used the 'remove all items' feature.

I see only minor discrepancies between what Kindles and the Kindle apps in the collections I have, and it doesn't really matter because I do not use them much.

[hleo12]

I also make collections for each author, but only if I have more than 5 books of them. The stragglers I have them sorted to "Sorter XX" (it's now up to Sorter 15. On average they have about 60-100 books each).
Although, I don't use them at all. I have my library set to only display collections and on ascending order.
I have 4 (sometimes 4) main collections that I use.
01 - Reading
02 - TBR
03 - Read
04 - DNF
05 - Rereading

I search for the book I wanna read, then shove them to either Reading or TBR.

Kindle really needs to overhaul their library system.