New kindle and folders

[Dragoro]

I had to buy a new kindle, will the folders i set up on my old kindle sync over to the new kindle or am I going to have to reorganize all my books again?

[poohbear_nc]

Currently folders don't sync across Kindles - you'd have to reset them up.

[Dragoro]

Sigh, ok.

[NogDog]

I don't know if this would work across separate Kindles or not, but it is possible to back up the collections.jar file. If you still have the original Kindle, you could copy the file to your PC, then when you get the new one, back up any existing file, replace it with the copy from the first Kindle, then do a Restart and see if it "takes". (If not, just replace it with the back-up from the new Kindle and Restart.)

[rdj999]

Originally Posted by NogDog

I don't know if this would work across separate Kindles or not, but it is possible to back up the collections.jar file. If you still have the original Kindle, you could copy the file to your PC, then when you get the new one, back up any existing file, replace it with the copy from the first Kindle, then do a Restart and see if it "takes". (If not, just replace it with the back-up from the new Kindle and Restart.)

I do not believe that will work, or worse, it could confuse the Kindle terribly. The activity in the referenced article copied the collections.json file to and from the same Kindle -- which could be very different than moving it from one Kindle to another, even if both Kindles seem to contain the "same" content.

Collections do seem to be defined in the file system/collections.json which seems to be a simple text file. Mine starts like this:

{"General Reference@en-US":{"items":["*9e97434880f115813437c1910b6dba7398c12e52","#ThankYouLetter_A1F83G8C2ARO7P^PSNL"],"lastAccess":1280322620840},"...

Notice the funny string of (hexadecimal) digits in red. Also, the "file name" ("ThankYouLetter...") is not exactly the same as the name of the actual file ("Thank You Letter..."). Also, "#" is frequently used (by geeks) as a "comment" character, meaning "ignore the rest of this thing unless you're a human reading this".

That hexadecimal string is likely a location on that Kindle where the item is located. Placing the same item on a different Kindle would likely result in a different identifying string. If you plop the collections.json file from one Kindle onto another, the new Kindle will likely go looking in all sorts of strange places for content items, and that might blow its mind.

One might, then, wonder if it would be better (less "risky") to mount one Kindle as a disk drive on a PC, copy all if its files to the PC, then mount another Kindle and copy all of those files to it. Having seen the [tt]collections.json[/tt] file, my educated guess is this would not work either and could also risk scrambling the second Kindle.

My reasoning for this conclusion is that copying files from one Kindle to the other does not guarantee that each file is located in the same "location" in the second Kindle's memory that the file occupied in the first. That would be highly unlikely to occur, so if the collections file has references to these "locations", they would be meaningless as well.

-^-rdj-^-

[NiLuJe]

Actually, it's the md5 hash of the full path of the filename, so, provided the file are named exactly the same way and in the same directories, and all the files are present in both Kindles, it should work.

(And a framework restart instead of a full reboot should also be enough to re-parse the collections)

Err, unless I missed something in the OP's request, if both Kindles are registered to your account, there's a 'pull collections from device' (or something like that, check the user manual v5) in the Archive options of the Home screens to merge the collections with the collections from another device registered to your account.

[tomsem]

If both Kindles are running 2.5.x, and registered to the same account, you can transfer collections between them:

To import a collection from another Kindle:
Select "Archived Items" from the Kindle Home screen.
Select "Add Other Device Collections" from the Archived Items page.
Select "OK" to confirm.
Note: Importing a collection from another device does not import the books or other items to your Kindle if they aren't downloaded already. However, books already on your Kindle that are associated with a collection will automatically appear under that collection name on your Home screen.