transfering books to new kindle

[sovre]

I manually manage my books on my Kindle using Calibre.

Having just bought a new Kindle, I transferred all my books from the old device to the new by copying over the entire documents folder.

Calibre can see all my books--when I look at the library I see over 1000.

However, looking at my collections on my Kindle, I can see that only 500 books are collected. On my old device, all books were associated with collections, so it seems like some collections data was lost in the transfer?

If I do a manual search, the books are there - it's just they are no longer associated with any collection.

What could have caused this? How does Kindle manage collections data for books? Is there a particular file that contains it?


I know I can go through all books individually and reorganize the 500 books that have gotten "lost" but that would take ages, and be very tedious, so I'm hoping there is some other way!

Thanks for your help.

[Tarana]

I'll be looking for this answer. I didn't know you could manage Collections using Calibre without jailbreaking.

[tomsem]

I don’t use calibre for much so I don’t know anything about managing collections with it.

But if your collections are supposed to sync with Amazon, it can take some time before they reconstitute themselves. Once collections are more than a few hundred items, it can take a Kindle better part of a minute to add or remove items. And it seems the Kindle stops counting with collections of 1000 or thereabouts. All of this is fine if you read on tablets and phones, no performance issues whatsoever. I don’t really understand why Kindle has such a difficult time with large collections, but I suspect they just have not given it much attention, because 95% of Kindle users do not use them (my guess).

My advice would be to keep them smaller than a couple of hundred each.

But easy for me to say: my usage of collections is minimal and when the Read/Unread feature showed up, I was able to get rid of my two largest and problematic collections. I just have six now, the largest is less than 100 items, and I could probably get by with 3.

[sovre]

Tarana, the collections I mean are not in Calibre - I use Calibre to transfer books to my Kindle - but these are just the collections Amazon itself allows us to make on the kindle. I know Calibre itself has some kind of collection function too, but I haven't tried using it yet.

Tomsem, so it sounds like I just need to give it some time and it will eventually place all books in their proper collections? I'll wait and see. Hopefully it will happen! The thing is it doesn't seem to be adding any new books at all to my collections even after hours have passed - numbers are the same now as they were earlier in the day.

Do you mean more than 1000 books on the device, or more than 1000 books in a specific collection? I have more than 1000 books on my Kindle total, but the collections themselves are not that big. I have several collections and if I remember my largest collection on my old Kindle was about 150 books.

[ilovejedd]

Max 1000 books in a collection (actually, I think it needs to be below 1K).

From experience though, browsing and search can feel a bit sluggish when you have that many books on the device.

[tomsem]

If you side load books then you have to add all of these to collections with each new device. Amazon only keeps track of the books you have in cloud (purchases plus personal documents).