Kindle doesn't show the books on Calibre

[afigen]

I have been using my Kindle Touch along with Calibre for some time now. I use calibre to convert books from epub to mobi, transfer books to the device, etc.

Today my Kindle froze as it does occasionally, so I restarted it and noticed that my device items were gone. So I connected the kindle to my pc. Calibre correctly shows the list of books that are on the device (Kindle) and Kindle/Documents on my desktop also shows the list of books, etc. However when I disconnect the Kindle to see the content I have nothing except the books purchased from the Amazon and those are in the Cloud file. Zero books in the device file.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks
Alp

[theducks]

Originally Posted by afigen

I have been using my Kindle Touch along with Calibre for some time now. I use calibre to convert books from epub to mobi, transfer books to the device, etc.

Today my Kindle froze as it does occasionally, so I restarted it and noticed that my device items were gone. So I connected the kindle to my pc. Calibre correctly shows the list of books that are on the device (Kindle) and Kindle/Documents on my desktop also shows the list of books, etc. However when I disconnect the Kindle to see the content I have nothing except the books purchased from the Amazon and those are in the Cloud file. Zero books in the device file.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks
Alp

Calibre leaves a file on your device, metadata.calibre that has a list of last known books.

Depending on your settings:
Preferences:Sending books to device:Metadata management
or
Device Preference setting for 'Read metadata from files on device',

this may not let the list get updated

[kovidgoyal]

Most likely your Kindle's book index was corrupted, hopefully it will rebuild it by itself (give it some time) otherwise you might have to do a hard reset and reload all your books.

[afigen]

Thanks. I have no problem with adding books from calibre library to the device (Kindle) as I see it in the Kindle properties when it is connected via USB to my mac. The problem is there is nothing on the Kindle display. So I removed the books from my device via calibre. When I did that Kindle's documents folder on my desktop emptied except for dictionaries.

Then I first added 3 books via calibre to the Kindle, disconnected and checked and those 3 books were added to Kindle. Thinking that I solved the problem I added approx. 30 more books from my calibre library. Checked again all books were gone and there was one book available under "Docs".

There is definitely a bug or a corruption in Kindle. Should I wait for a day or so and try again or just hard reset?

[kovidgoyal]

If you deleted the files already, you might as well hard reset.

[kovidgoyal]

Another thing that I have known to happen with Kindle's is if there is a mobi file whose metadata causes the kindle indexer to crash, the kindle refuses to index any files after that file.

In such cases your best best is to do a mobi to mobi conversion in calibre before sending, though identifying the problem book is a pain as the kindle does not give any diagnostic info when the indexer crashes.

[afigen]

Thanks a lot. I think that's probably the problem. Although I have not identified the corrupted book/(s), I have about half a dozen books sent to kindle without problems. I will live with that for a while, I guess.