Repairing the Kindle

After the panic/distress of having lost all of my e-books dissipated, I set about restoring the books. Once that was done (and after backing them up!), I downloaded the Kindle Collection Manager and tried to assign books to collections. I knew where about 70% belonged, but as the program's interface is minimal (to be polite), I could only see the books' titles and not their authors, so some books will have to be collected manually.

The Collection Manager updates the Kindle which then has to be reset in order to recognise the assignments. Resetting the Kindle always requires a leap of faith but especially after the previous escapade. When the Kindle came back up, the collections appeared with their books; I was, however, unable to assign books to collections via the Kindle: the 'Add to collection' option was greyed out.

Checking the Amazon web site, I discovered that this problem gets fixed once the Kindle connects to Amazon. Even though the Kindle was connected to the Internet via its wireless connection, it still wasn't connecting to Amazon. I discovered that the hard reset also unregisters the Kindle, so I tried to register anew. I know the required email address but had no idea what the password was, so I had to go through the awkward process of resetting the password. There's a problem with the website - I thought that I had reset the password (and quite probably had), but instead of seeing a screen saying that the password had been reset successfully, I saw the opening screen in the sequence which invites me to enter a password.

Eventually I realised what was needed and reset the password; I then entered this password into the Kindle in the correct place, and - lo and behold! - I could manually add books to collections. There was still no sign of the books which I had purchased via Amazon - I thought these would have downloaded as soon as I registered.

Whilst looking through the books which were on the Kindle, I saw that the final 'book' was entitled 'Archive items (22)'. I caused this list to be displayed and this is where I found the missing books. After pressing the correct sequence of keys, these books finally downloaded and found their place on the Kindle. I once again backed up the books!

Lessons learnt from this episode:  

• DO NOT USE 'resetmykindle' unless you are absolutely desperate! 😓
• Backup the books beforehand. 
• Make sure you know what the password for your Amazon account is.

I will now read some of the new books - for example, Robbie Robertson's version of what happened to The Band.