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Comment by htamas | Hacker News Reader

My Kindle had this "bug" where my side loaded books randomly disappear. As a workaround, I have to keep it in flight mode at all times. Not a big issue since that’s what I would do anyway, but in case my Kindle would break, I wouldn’t think long to buy an alternative

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This happend to my kindle to! After keeping in in flight mode for years I put it online again in order to buy a few new books from the kindle store, poof suddenly my entire library of side loaded books was gone, with progress and everything. I could see random metadata files related to the books on the drive, be books was gone. Super annoying as many of the books I didn't have locally anymore and to loose the "archivement" of finished books sucks big time. I can see this may be implemented by amazon to counter piracy, but alot of these books was perfectly legal. So the result of this is that I will never put my kindle online again and just stop buying from the Kindle store.

Same, though I don't think it is going to help Amazon the way they hope it does. I moved books over to my kindle and had it nuke my humble bundle collections when I added a purchase from Amazon. I've not connect it again until I figure out how to backup and restore MY metadata.

Won’t help with restoring metadata, but if you add books by using the “email to kindle” feature it will keep them in your library through syncs

I had an issue exactly like this with my iPad.

Keep mine in Aeroplane mode. Download books I buy on Amazon directly from amazon and drop them into calibre. Amazon doesn't get to touch my Kindle ever.

Thinking hard if I ever want to get another Kindle when Amazon can just screw around with what I put on my Kindle ...

I just email epubs (as .txt) to my kindle's email address and they show up on the device in a couple of minutes. Never had any books just vanish.

I find it easier than converting to Kindle format and then copying over USB.

Why email epubs as txt? You can just email the epubs. I do it every day.

"You have a serious reading problem"

I do! https://3e.org/books/

Bookmarked Ty for recs

impressive list. i have a book rec for you not on your list: Battle Mage by Peter Flannery

This actually happened to me after connecting to wi-fi but there is a workaround that I found:

Convert your book to .azw3 in Calibre

Instead of sending it to the device in Calibre, locate the azw3 file (Right click -> Open book folder).

Copy the file to your Kindle, but not to the "documents" folder (where Calibre usually puts it) but rather into Downloads->Items

This folder is where books go when you buy them from Amazon or receive them after using the Send to Kindle feature. I have only tried this with azw3 so far but it might also work with .mobi format.

You’re lucky. I’ve seen books disappear from my Kindle even in flight mode. I wonder what is behind such a persistent bug.

> I wonder what is behind such a persistent bug.

At what point do we stop giving the benefit of the doubt that it's a "bug"?

You make an interesting point. Maybe facilitating the usage of sideloaded books is not among Amazon’s priorities. Yet I don’t know how much of that comes from malice rather than simply negligence or lack of interest.

It’s directly against their priority of influencing you to only purchase ebooks through their monopoly. Whether anti-competitive, anti-user practices are malicious or just a consequence of capitalism run wild, I don’t think there’s much of a difference

Most likely, it is something they don’t test because it isn’t officially supported.

It seems a stretch to imagine that the dev team don't sideload books themselves. Of course that wouldn't be official testing, ...

Right. And it’s not officially supported because they are incentivized not to support it.

i'm not really sure what benefit you think they're gaining by breaking the less convenient, less user-friendly way to sideload books.

They're perfectly happy to let you email books to the kindle that you bought at other stores (or stole), as well as sync your progress with those books, backup those books to their servers, and generally have the full reading experience with all the benefits of the kindle ecosystem even if you didn't buy the book through kindle. If they didn't want to encourage the use of third-party files, surely they'd make it more difficult than a bug that randomly deletes books off some people's kindles sometimes.

The benefit (or potential gain) is that some people will just buy the book from the Kindle store to avoid the pain. I've seen that happen first-hand to my wife.

Also by emailing books or loading through their servers, they can still track and get that sweet sweet data/metadata that Amazon thrives on. When you sideload, you don't even have to connect it to the internet, which makes analytics more challenging.

okay, but this all still seems like a needlessly complicated conspiracy theory.

if they want people to buy books from their store, why do they make it so easy to not buy books from their store?

bugs happen. not every bug is part of jeff bezos' nefarious plan.

It doesn't have to be a nefarious plan to put the bug in, but once it's there, it's guaranteed to be in the very bottom of the backlog to fix it.

Out of all the devices where having a physical airplane mode switch would be nice, I'd put the kindle pretty high up. Kinda sucks having a battery that lasts ~45 days in airplane mode, and like a week and a half when I forget to turn it off.

Rather than a physical switch just for that, why not a few reminders in the UI if one keeps the airplane mode off for a certain amount of time?

Physical switch is less prone to the whims of a capricious, resume-driven product owner who thinks their users may just want to get rid of airplane mode. Most are diving into firmware.

Most are not* diving into firmware, rather.

Since the kindles with 3G have disappeared, the need for airplane mode for actual airplane use is a lot less though. Where I am most airlines permit WiFi use and even offer it themselves in flight. Only mobile network connections still have to be switched off.

Airplane mode is mostly a power-saving feature, because WiFi drains the battery pretty hard. As others said, leaving wifi on will kill your kindle in a week or so, whereas it can go on for months without it.

That's not my experience. My kindle paperwhite (latest version until yesterday) lasts at least 3 months with WiFi on. I never turn it off.

I basically always keep it offline, pushing updates via usb-c

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