Kindle PW2 no longer saving notes, highlights or even progress

[jhowell]

I never noticed the problem before. I don't use the highlight feature and when I read a book I keep it downloaded on all of the devices that I might switch between and then delete it from them all when I am done. Under those conditions syncing of the last page read seems to work properly.

[rpgmaker]

Originally Posted by jhowell

I never noticed the problem before. I don't use the highlight feature and when I read a book I keep it downloaded on all of the devices that I might switch between and then delete it from them all when I am done. Under those conditions syncing of the last page read seems to work properly.

It seems that if the book is kept on the Kindle device they will sync on the others but that essentially means that all your notes, highlights and reading progress (which means little once you finish a book) are backed up on a device, not the "cloud". I also leave my books on my kindle once I finished reading them but a device is an obviously poor substitute for online storage. I'm glad that it is still useful to you but there's no need to sugarcoat the middle-finger Amazon has given to anyone who was trusting the kindle email service to keep a backup available at all times.

[odamizu]

Originally Posted by rpgmaker

Which device and fw version you have? Can you please let me know if it restored everything after performing the next steps: email a new book to your kindle device (or just downloading one you haven't read yet), set the progress some place other than 0%, highlight something, sync kindle, delete book and re-download it and see if everything is restored. On my kindle, after performing those steps nothing is restored, not even the reading progress.

I have a Voyage on 5.8.1 and Oasis on 5.8.1.0.1

I am experiencing the same thing you and jhowell are experiencing. As you said in another post, this really sucks.

WhisperSync is one of the big advantages of having a Kindle.

Any chance this is a temporary glitch or is this really the new normal?

[rpgmaker]

Originally Posted by odamizu

Any chance this is a temporary glitch or is this really the new normal?

Amazon is taking longer than usual (they said so themselves in a follow up email) to get back to me so from the looks of it it may be a temporary glitch. You should contact support reporting the same issue so the chances of it becoming a "thing" increases

I'm a little bit surprise that I seem to be the first to report it on the forum though. I also googled around and didn't see anyone mentioning it anywhere. Weird. I would assume that the feature it's very popular.

[odamizu]

I've been experimenting, and I've been able to restore all notes and highlights, but I haven't been able to quite pin down what triggers the restoration.

If I delete a book on my Kindle, then re-download it, everything is gone — highlights, notes, page location.

If I then go to Kindle for iOS, turn the page to establish a new page location, then go back to my Kindle, the page location syncs. This happens consistently.

Here's where it gets fuzzy. If I highlight a passage on my Kindle, and go back to iOS, it syncs to iOS. But getting iOS to sync back to Kindle, is trickier and seems to require some combination of highlighting a passage in iOS, going back to Kindle, going to Home screen, then opening the book again. Hitting "Sync my Kindle" may or may not help. I tried so many combinations with inconsistent results that I'm not sure what worked in the end. All I know is that if I do enough highlighting and syncing back and forth between iOS and Kindle, and go back to the Home screen at least once for good measure, eventually all annotations are restored.

So the annotations aren't necessarily lost, but they aren't automatically restored if you delete and re-download a book. It seems to need to sync with another device. Not sure if the annotations are stored in the cloud and the syncing triggers the download of annotations, or if the syncing is done between devices, and if you delete a book from all of your devices the annotations are truly lost.

[rpgmaker]

The unpredictable behaviour (although it's very predictable for me) is what's making me think that it can be an issue and not a definitive removal of the feature. That and the fact that Amazon support hasn't outright told me so by now. I really recommend that you contact Amazon regarding this issue, it can be via chat (that's how I did it) and report your issue. The more people that report it to them the better.

[rpgmaker]

It wasn't very straightforward but the issue has been resolved and you all have me to thank for

I've been contacting amazon (via chat) since I created this thread and every time the person on the other end told me that a case had been opened and someone was going to contact me to follow up on it sometime during the next 48hrs. Turns out they never reached out again and I had to initiate another support chat and explain my problem again which was very annoying. They supposedly read the previous chats but they still asked more or less the same kind of standard questions, I just started to save the transcripts myself (Amazon never did email them to me even though I marked the checkbox asking for them) and copy and paste from them. This wasn't a problem in itself but why did they tell me (every time) that someone was going to reach out to me if no one was going to do it? Also, every now and again one of them told me that the case's priority had been bumped but the next one I contacted told me that that hasn't been the case at all and that s/he was going to really bump the case priority. Others told me that a case had not being created at all and that s/he was really going to create one now. I swear to you I thought I was dealing with chatbots. One of the chats was particularly infuriating because the tech support representative, instead of trying to help me solve the issue, pretended that the feature had never been there for emailed docs when we all know that it used to be there. It was so disingenuous that I get mad just remembering it.

In the end I initiated around 8 tech support chats and they were all more or less the same so I was growing very angry because they weren't doing anything really other than effectively just logging my complains. I got so frustrated in fact that in my last chat I started to write a very, ahem, direct email to jeff@amazon.com more out of anger (I sent a screenshot of the email to the representative I was chatting with) than actually thinking that he was going to read it. I included the case number in the email. The representative actually seemed to really come alive after this and immediately asked me for the kindle logs (no representative had done that up until that point). Hours later I received this:

I'm XXXXXXXXXXX of Amazon's Tech Support Executive Customer Relations. Jeff Bezos received your email and asked me to respond on his behalf.

...

So Jeff Bezos does read those emails. Nice . Now they really started to work on the case (oh yeah, you also have to thank my pen pal Jeff, not only me! ). After a few emails the executive told me that the engineers knew where the problem was and that they were going to deploy the fix over the next few days. They deployed it a few days ago and the problem was fixed so now if you try to reproduce the issue the same way I did earlier in the thread everything should sync for emailed docs

I'm glad that everything works now (thanks Jeff!) but no one should go through what I went through in order to get some attention to their case. To me it seemed like Amazon's tech support chat representatives were part of a very poor outsourcing operation at best or chatbots at worst. The executive seemed to recognize that my case was very poorly managed so probably something like this won't happen again to someone else. The issue itself wasn't that critical, what frustrated me was the way they seemed to be shuffling me around without actually doing anything at all about the issue. It can be very frustrating. I think they were hoping that I would just let up and forget about it but I wasn't about to give up my cloud-backed highlights that easily