Kindle Keyboard to Oasis 3 so far a bumpy road

[crouton]

Has anyone else done this? I have a large library of sideloaded books on my kindle keyboard and just purchased an oasis 3 during the sale. Stupid me figured that it would be easy to just move all my old books over the same way I moved from previous kindles to the keyboard.

It did not work (surprise). So now since my clippings file is an old txt, moving it with the old files from the keyboard documents folder to the new oasis was a disaster, it just created a new clippings file as if it were a new book.

None of my older books show 100% or marked as read etc.

Any way to get over these humps or do I just have to start over fresh? It's frustrating because I wanted to keep my old read books marked as read so I can go back and look chronologically (i know i know) but when I tried just moving the whole documents folder from the old kindle to the oasis the oasis just created "new" folders for each book so sorting by recent showed everything in alphabetical order and nothing was marked as read or partially read.

Any advice is appreciated. The Oasis is pretty and the screen is nice, warmth works well. But I hate having to start from scratch and load everything again and manually mark it as read or partially read.

It's also driving me nuts that items downloaded from a calibre server will never show the covers on the oasis, if I load the same files using usb the covers are loaded.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by crouton

Any advice is appreciated. The Oasis is pretty and the screen is nice, warmth works well. But I hate having to start from scratch and load everything again and manually mark it as read or partially read.

Since you are asking for advice, mine is to let go of the idea that this one device is the center of your reading universe.

I only keep the book I am currently reading and a few potential next reads on my device and use calibre to keep track of everything else.

That works well for me because I switch between reading on an Oasis and Kindle apps on my phone and tablet. Amazon keeps everything in sync for me. I don’t care about cover thumbnails.

[tomsem]

@crouton, perhaps you could share how you kept track of which books you had ‘read’ on the Kindle Keyboard? And are these books side-loaded, purchased from Amazon, or a mixture of both?

If you get them from Amazon (or have uploaded as personal documents) then reading position should sync to whatever they were when last synched, and all your annotations should be there as well.

If you side-loaded, then you’ll pretty much have to start from scratch (at least if not using calibre - I don’t use calibre enough to know what it can and cannot do in your situation).

Kindle Keyboard does not support cloud collections, or the notion of read vs. unread. There used to be a way to initialize cloud collections to what they were on an older device, but I don’t know if that’s still possible (I don’t see any option for it, at any rate).

Recent Kindles let you toggle Read/Unread status, and automatically set it to ‘Read’ if you get to the ‘end’ location of the book (as publisher defines it). But again, this only applies to books from Amazon and Personal Documents. You can mark anything as READ but if it doesn’t sync reading position to Amazon servers, it is only READ on that device.

When the READ feature first appeared, I did have to update this status for a number of books in my library, though most were already in the ‘proper’ state. Prior to this I had ‘Read previously’ and ‘To be read in the future’ collections to track this, but I no longer require these (a good thing, since Kindle does not perform well with collections of several hundred items in them).

[SusanReads]

I think I would go crazy if I'd used my e-reader as a way to keep track what I have read. That's why I use GoodReads. All my books are there, sorted by date, shelf, you name it.

I do have collections on my Kindles and put every new book in my To Read collection. When I'm finished I just move it to a different collection.

I only sideload my books so I have those same collections as folders on my computer and I update them about once a week (just move the books from my To Read folder to the right folder. I sort them by genre).

So if I need to reset one of my Kindles, I can easily load my books per folder onto my Kindle and then add them to the right collection manually.

So not really helping you with your problem I think, but just showing you a different way.

[badgoodDeb]

And for another different way: I also don't rely on my Kindle to do more than present me with books. I'm old school. I keep a text file on my (mac/pc; mac in my case) that lists Title, Author, date read (maybe price paid - free or $x.xx). Possibly a word "hated" or such.

I GET this data from the clippings file. It marks every bookmark I made, so I read through clippings to find the last bookmark for each book, and enter this info in my text file. You'd be doing a whole lot of them at once (groan), but I do it every time I finish a book.

Then I delete the clippings file, so it doesn't get so long. Once I've copied "date finished" and name, author for each book, I don't want that info any longer.

Sometimes I copy this text file onto the kindle, most often I don't. But it's great for searching for an author, or a word in a title, etc.

I do keep a DONE folder on my Oasis I, but I occasionally purge that folder, and leave the books only in the Kindle's cloud.

When I also switched from a kindle keyboard (as you are doing), I had to switch to the new Cloud collections. Painful at first, but it can now be done a bit faster on a computer, on your amazon device/contents page. I only bother with folders for: Current, Done, Paid$$, Read2015, Read 2016 .... etc. Books that I got free are not in any folder, unless they are interesting enough to put into Current (which has > 100 books in it now!). So it's really a ToBeRead folder.