Looking for a consultant to assist in migrating from Kindle for PC to calibre

[kgwdc]

I have a library of about 5,000 Kindle titles. Until recently, they were organized in several hundred Collections, primarily within the Kindle for PC (K4PC) app. That is, until I was told by Amazon's Kindle technicians one day recently that the count of titles on my K4PC didn't match my actual title count shown on Amazon's end, and that some of my K4PC files had become corrupt.

I was instructed by the techs to unregister the device, delete all the K4PC log and system files, uninstall, and then reinstall the program.

At that point, all the cataloging (ie. collections) I'd worked hard to create over hundreds of hours seemed to just disappear--despite assurances by the techs that it would still be resident in the cloud and could be resynced to my K4PC afterward.

To date, the Collections have not reappeared (much less the lists of books within those Collections)and many (most?) of the older books shown as downloaded in fact need to be removed from the device and redownloaded to open them.

Though the case is still open and supposedly being worked on by people in Kindle's tech support, I'm not only very frustrated but also pessimistic that we'll resolve the problem satisfactorily.

Meanwhile, a few years back I had downloaded and tested an early version of calibre--to evaluate and see how it worked. I stopped fairly early on when I realized that it created a duplicate file of every title I already had in my K4PC folder, and I couldn't tell which version housed my notes, highlights, or reading progress in them. Just seemed too confusing, so I set it aside and stuck with K4PC.

Now wondering if -- with some expert guidance -- there's a way I can (fairly) quickly recreate my Collections structure on calibre, port it over to my K4PC (and the Paperwhite, iPad, iPhone and Android Kindle apps I have installed), using it (calibre) to manage the library data, while only relying on K4PC as my "reader."

I have are a bunch of questions but not very much time, so I'm wondering if there is a "consultant" here (or elsewhere) who could help me through the situation, and get me up a learning and solution curve faster than muddling through on my own. I know my way around all the devices pretty well but extra time is something I don't have.

Any suggestions on a calibre expert who also knows their way around the various Kindle apps who could help with this at a reasonable price? And if not a specific person, suggestions on where I could find/post for them?

Thanks in advance.

Kip

[Rizla]

Maybe post this in the Amazon sub-section, too?

[HarryT]

No. Please do NOT make duplicate posts.

[Mike L]

I'm sorry I can't answer your question. I hope someone else does.

But I would like to ask: Why do you find it necessary to store 5,000 books in your Kindle for PC application? Do you plan to actually read all those books in the near future? Are these books that you have already read and perhaps want to refer to again?

It seems to me it would be so much easier to keep the relevant files in a directory on your computer - with or without using Calibre to organise them into collections - and to copy a file to the Kindle directory when you want to read the book. Once you have finished reading it, just delete it from the Kindle directory. That way, you have a way of keeping track of the books, you won't have duplicates of 5,000 files, and the whole thing will be much easier to manage.

If I am missing something obvious, my apologies. In any case, I hope you find a solution to your original problem.

Mike

[eschwartz]

If you use calibre as the main location for all your books and collections info, etc, you can have it send books to your devices.

• Use the Calibre Companion app for Android (link to Google Play) to organize all your books. It can make use of all of calibre's metadata and open a book you search for in any reader app on your Android.
  
• The best reader app for iOS is Marvin which has phenomenal support for calibre, and the developer actually hangs out on MobileRead and interacts with real users!Dedicated Marvin forum here on MobileRead: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=260

Both will allow you to create a custom column in calibre that contains collections and sync those collections. They will cost $2.99 each I believe.

• On your computer, calibre can also natively read pretty much any ebook format in its own ebook-viewer.exe (or you can set it to open in the computer's default app).
  
• For the Paperwhite, if you want to manage collections other than through the Kindle itself, which is slow and bulky, you will need to jailbreak it and install a kindlet app. If you're interested, start reading here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=186305

If you do manage to restore your collections within the Kindle app, and import it to your Paperwhite, then the same Paperwhite hack will also allow you to export the collections to calibre. But you may not want to bother, as it means your problem is already solved.

Notes, highlights, progress, etc. will always be associated specifically with the app that opened the book, regardless of anything else. Within an ecosystem, Marvin can sync between multiple instances on different devices, as the Kindles/apps do via Amazon's servers, and calibre within its highly portable database.

I hope this helps you, or at least gives you some good ideas, but if you need any help, just ask here -- MobileRead is full of helpful people who can probably answer any question you have!

And on that note, welcome to MobileRead!

[cybmole]

k 4 PC can be buggy - though Amazon won't admit it., especially after a few local software version updates.
the quickest way to test whether you've lost your cloud data would be to fresh install K for PC on a different PC and attempt to download your notes, collections etc from cloud. IF they arrive corrupted than your cloud data is messed up. if they arrive OK on the new PC, then it's your local data on the other PC that is corrupted, and maybe a total registry clean, delete app data folders etc will be needed.
Getting the books themselves into Calibre is trivial, the extra disc space for 5000 books is not great, but I don't think calibre can do anythiing about the book related notes. they live in separate little files, I per book & I think add-books leaves them behind ( I could be wrong about that)
calibre has powerful tools for creating new collections but some human input of logic & time will be needed
add books also wrongly populates first name, last name author fields from Kindle books, which is an extra annoyance

somewhere on the amazon site is a techie Kindle forum & you could cross post there for more advice