9 Answers2025-07-06
Your archived items are also archived on your old device (even if you deleted them from your downloaded books list to make room). Now that you have a device with more storage, you might want to re-download some of these archived books. Make sure you’re viewing your library as ‘All’ or ‘Cloud’ and not just ‘Downloaded’. I discovered that I have a complete history of all my purchases over the last years, and can even re-download books I’ve purchased on sale years ago (I found three such books from 2017 that I had purchased but never read). Transferring to a new device became a fun library excavation.
9 Answers2025-07-29
It’s a complex space, but what’s most fascinating is the fragmentation. There are a number of apps that lend e-books, including Libby, Hoopla, CloudLibrary, and Axis 360. The e-book collections, lending terms, and device support vary widely among them. I remain skeptical that there will be sufficient pressure to standardize or that libraries will ultimately consolidate to a single platform, given the models that are driving them today. In the meantime, we’re all amateur librarians, deciding which apps to use on which devices in a search for a single way to read our books on our preferred screens. It’s a first-world problem, perhaps, but it’s still a problem.
11 Answers2025-12-25
Organizing a large library on the Paperwhite is greatly improved with Collections!. After moving all your books to the device, take some time to organize them into Collections on the device or on the “Manage Your Content & Devices” website. You can organize purchased books as well as personal documents into the same Collection (such as a bookshelf). It isn’t until you organize the thousands of books that you transferred to the device that you can say that you have completed the transfer process. Organizing on the website is much faster than organizing on the device. Select the books you wish to add to a collection, click “Add to Collection” and then select or create a collection. Note that Collections organized on the Amazon device sync to other Amazon-enabled devices where you have purchased books. So in short, this feature turns a mess of unorganized files into a real library of your personal e-books.
11 Answers2025-07-25
I have found many people to misunderstand this function because Kindle books are not simple files that one can email to themselves. Kindle books are protected by Digital Rights Management and are meant to be read within Amazon’s eco-system. Therefore, to download books previously purchased, one simply registers a new device to their Amazon account and all of their prior purchases will download. I find it is like having a Netflix account. One does not transfer a movie from one TV to another. Instead, one simply logs into Netflix on the new TV. This also applies to books that have been borrowed from Prime Reading or from Kindle Unlimited. Those books will only download if one currently has an active membership.
10 Answers2025-07-20
I forgot to check whether the book I requested from the library was a PDF. Most PDFs don’t read very well on the Kindle – the text is typically too small and doesn’t reflow to fit the screen. You can “Send to Kindle” a PDF and choose whether to have it automatically converted by Amazon, or not. I’ve had the converted version be almost as bad as just reading the PDF on a tablet, but sometimes it works okay. The book is converted by Calibre to MOBI or AZW3 as well, but that is essentially random and depends on the quality of the PDF that was created. I would recommend just trying to read the PDF on your tablet. If you really want to read it on your Kindle, you could try sending it with “Convert” in the subject line of the email, and hopefully it will work out okay for you. A lot of library eBooks are PDFs of scanned book pages, so don’t read very well on any eReader.
12 Answers2025-08-13
As someone who always looks at things from an accessibility perspective, my concern is that someone who is vision impaired and reads Amazon-exclusive titles on their Kindle with the specific fonts they prefer could be prohibited from having access to that content because it is tied to a family member’s email account. While the Household feature is a good first step, the process of adding others to a Household is unclear and can be confusing for non-tech-savvy individuals. Amazon should develop an easier, more disability-friendly way to grant access to content to caregivers and dependents in those situations. As it stands now, the all-or-nothing Household model does not appear to have been designed with these types of scenarios in mind. It is designed for and works best for the typical, tech-savvy, two-adult Household. Real life is messier than that.
8 Answers2025-10-30
For those of you visually-oriented folks, here’s a mental flowchart for moving your books to your new Kindle. Was the book purchased from Amazon? Yes -> it’s in the cloud. You register your new Kindle and download the books. No -> did you email it to yourself or use “Send to Kindle”? Yes -> these things are linked to your account email. Just re-send to your new Kindle email. No -> it’s a USB sideload. Copy files from your old Kindle’s “documents” folder to the corresponding folder on your new Kindle. Note that the only real variable here is your reading progress. Books from Amazon are synced via Whispersync, but non-Amazon books do not get synced in this fashion. That means you might have to find your place in these books. Not ideal, but that’s the nature of the current e-book ecosystem.
10 Answers2025-09-04
For parents, managing their children’s devices is an extra layer to manage. Children’s books on Amazon can be managed through the Family Library within the Children’s Books store. To start reading your child’s books on their new Kindle or Fire, add the new device to your Amazon Household and ensure that the relevant books are added to your Family Library, sharing enabled for the child’s profile on the new device. Look for a family or sharing plan on other platforms. As the process is account-centric, you will also need to look into the parental controls and profiles for the new device, which can be a complex area to navigate. It’s worth testing the child’s access to their preferred bedtime story on the new device before wiping their old one.
3 Answers2025-08-09
Most of my novels get transferred to my Kindle from my Mac on a weekly basis. The most straightforward way to do this is via USB. You just connect the Kindle to your Mac, open up the Kindle’s ‘Documents’ folder, and dump your novels in there. If a novel is a non-MOBI PDF or some other format, I use Calibre to convert it to MOBI in a flash. Calibre is free and very easy to use – just add your novel, choose your output format, and export it to your Kindle.
Emailing your Kindle is another great way to wirelessly send novels. All of your Kindles are listed on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Click on the email address associated with each Kindle and attach the novel you want to send to it. Type “convert” in the subject line of the email if you are sending a novel that is not already in MOBI or PDF format. There is also a “Send to Kindle” app available for Macs that allows you to drag and drop the novels you want to send to your Kindle and the app will automatically convert them for you.
I use Dropbox too. When I’m reading a book on my iPad and I get a chance to sit at my Mac, I upload the file to my Dropbox account, open the book on my Mac, and share it with my Kindle from the ‘Share’ menu. This method is really cool if you have multiple devices. Make sure the book is in the correct format for your Kindle before you send it though.
6 Answers2025-07-06
Remember the storage capacity of your Kindle. A base Kindle has 8GB of storage. When you transfer a large Google Play library of books with images, be prepared for it to fill up very quickly. You need to be realistic about how many books you can transfer to your Kindle. Perhaps you will have to choose between purchasing and downloading other books, or purchase a Kindle with more storage. Side-loaded books also do not get the benefit of Amazon’s Whispersync service for notes and highlights between devices, unless you use the ‘Send to Kindle’ service. The annotations you put in a side-loaded book are stuck on that one device.