problem copying to Kindle Voyage

[rbdavis]

Hi all,

I am having difficulty moving books from calibre to my Kindle. I've had substantial disruption in my e-reading life of late, namely (i) my Mac needed a system drive replacement, and (ii) I bought a new Kindle Voyage. I had no disk backup of my original calibre library, but still have my old Kindle, so I just installed the latest calibre (2.13) onto my new Yosemite system and then transferred everything from my old Kindle into calibre. I had already downloaded all my Amazon content straight from Amazon to my new Voyage, so all I then needed to do was to get the non-Amazon content from calibre onto my new Voyage, and this is where I am having problems.

I connected my new Voyage to the Mac and started SendToDevice'ing books from the library to the device. All the usual status bars, etc., appeared and behaved normally, and the OnDevice column of calibre's library contents list showed a green checkmark indicating that the books were copied to the device. All seemed well except that when I disconnected the Voyage from calibre and looked at its own content listing, the books were NOT on the device! It seems like maybe calibre is confused between my old and new Kindles -- does it somehow cache device contents in the time intervals between device disconnects and reconnects (or the connection of a new, different device which it is not differentiating from the old device)?

Anyhow, I noticed that Amazon content which I had reloaded into calibre from my old Kindle was AZW, whereas my non-Amazon content was MOBI. (I therefore assume it was also MOBI on my original Kindle.) So, I converted a couple of books from MOBI to AZW3 within calibre (regular AZW does not seem to be a conversion choice), deleted the original MOBI versions, and then tried transferring the new AZW3s to my Voyage. That worked, and the transferred books appeared in my Voyage's contents listing as soon as I disconnected it from calibre. As far as I know, Voyage supports MOBI format, so this seems pretty weird. Again, it seems that calibre may be confusing my devices, thinking that the MOBI version was present on my new device because it was present on my old device, but successfully transferring the AZW3 because that version was NEVER present on the old device.

Does anyone know what is happening here? Do I REALLY have to convert all my non-Amazon content in calibre from MOBI to AZW3 to get it onto my new Voyage?

Thanks!

Roger Davis
Honolulu

[theducks]

Originally Posted by rbdavis

Hi all,

I am having difficulty moving books from calibre to my Kindle. I've had substantial disruption in my e-reading life of late, namely (i) my Mac needed a system drive replacement, and (ii) I bought a new Kindle Voyage. I had no disk backup of my original calibre library, but still have my old Kindle, so I just installed the latest calibre (2.13) onto my new Yosemite system and then transferred everything from my old Kindle into calibre. I had already downloaded all my Amazon content straight from Amazon to my new Voyage, so all I then needed to do was to get the non-Amazon content from calibre onto my new Voyage, and this is where I am having problems.

I connected my new Voyage to the Mac and started SendToDevice'ing books from the library to the device. All the usual status bars, etc., appeared and behaved normally, and the OnDevice column of calibre's library contents list showed a green checkmark indicating that the books were copied to the device. All seemed well except that when I disconnected the Voyage from calibre and looked at its own content listing, the books were NOT on the device! It seems like maybe calibre is confused between my old and new Kindles -- does it somehow cache device contents in the time intervals between device disconnects and reconnects (or the connection of a new, different device which it is not differentiating from the old device)?

Anyhow, I noticed that Amazon content which I had reloaded into calibre from my old Kindle was AZW, whereas my non-Amazon content was MOBI. (I therefore assume it was also MOBI on my original Kindle.) So, I converted a couple of books from MOBI to AZW3 within calibre (regular AZW does not seem to be a conversion choice), deleted the original MOBI versions, and then tried transferring the new AZW3s to my Voyage. That worked, and the transferred books appeared in my Voyage's contents listing as soon as I disconnected it from calibre. As far as I know, Voyage supports MOBI format, so this seems pretty weird. Again, it seems that calibre may be confusing my devices, thinking that the MOBI version was present on my new device because it was present on my old device, but successfully transferring the AZW3 because that version was NEVER present on the old device.

Does anyone know what is happening here? Do I REALLY have to convert all my non-Amazon content in calibre from MOBI to AZW3 to get it onto my new Voyage?

Thanks!

Roger Davis
Honolulu

Kindles are backwards compatible , so Mobi is still good.
IMHO AZW3 for new stuff if you care to make use of Calibres editor to tweak the book.

[GoSharks]

@rbdavis-

This sounds like your Kindle is choking on a corrupted book file... you can check and see if your voyage is still indexing (nonsense word search from home page with search set for 'All Items') or try reconverting a couple titles mobi-to-mobi and then delete 'Original Mobi' file and send the book back to your device.

[rbdavis]

Originally Posted by theducks

Kindles are backwards compatible , so Mobi is still good.
IMHO AZW3 for new stuff if you care to make use of Calibres editor to tweak the book.

Thanks for confirming that MOBI should still be usable!

Roger

[rbdavis]

Originally Posted by GoSharks

@rbdavis-

This sounds like your Kindle is choking on a corrupted book file... you can check and see if your voyage is still indexing (nonsense word search from home page with search set for 'All Items') or try reconverting a couple titles mobi-to-mobi and then delete 'Original Mobi' file and send the book back to your device.

Thanks, GoSharks. If I convert MOBI -> MOBI, delete the original MOBI and then transfer the new MOBI to my Voyage, all is OK. This procedure seems a lot more like voodoo than anything rational, but you can't argue with success. What really does not make sense to me is if the original MOBI was bad, then how can the new MOBI converted from that be anything BUT bad? Garbage in is now gorgeous out?

Thanks for the winning suggestion, and I'll try to keep my caliber library better backed up in the future so that I never have to go through THIS again!

Roger