The Paperwhite -- and all touchscreen Kindles -- needs to be jailbroken. See the relevant stickies in our Kindle Developers Corner.
A newly-purchased Kindle stands a good chance of not shipping with firmware 5.7.x so keep the WiFi
OFF until you have a chance to jailbreak.
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The Collections plugin is pretty handy
and works for all books not just the sideloaded ones.
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The Kindle has no concept of series #, but I use a plugboard to insert it into the title instead, which works as well for me:
Code:
{title}{#subseries:| (|, }{#subseries_index:|Book |)}{series:| (|, }{series_index:|Book |)}
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No syncing the read status unfortunately. Like most things, the Kindle stores that info in the hidden system partition.