A Kindle App Disaster

More than once, I’ve had to uninstall the Kindle app on my tablet and reinstall it. Normally, it screws up my carousel, and it screws up my collections, but it’s fixable. Time-consuming, but fixable. Yesterday, I had to uninstall and reinstall it, and that’s when sh*t hit the fan. When you’re a reviewer, your books come from many sources. I get them from Amazon, NetGalley, Edelweiss, Smashwords, authors, tour hosts, etc.

Well, when I reinstalled the app, all the books I sent to myself from my computer using the “Send to Kindle” app from Amazon disappeared. It was a mess, but that’s happened before too. I had to spend 2 days resending myself documents, but I got it done. But this time, those documents disappeared from my Amazon account as well.

After chatting with 3 associates, explaining the situation repeatedly, then reexplaining because they wanted to troubleshoot problems I wasn’t having, it isn’t good news. I would have thought they could rollback my account to put the documents back in there. They cannot. Essentially, it’s a “Wow, tough luck; you need to resend yourself all those books you lost. Hopefully, you still have them on your computer.”

Honestly, I’ve been raging since yesterday because I’m just so tired. I don’t think the app is worth it anymore. I spent my morning looking for new apps. I’m going to have to figure out what to do about the books that come from NetGalley because those epubs work with Aldiko and I didn’t love the app. I can check out PocketBook though.

For the time being, I’m also closing my review requests. I need to finish the current books, and then hopefully, I will have a plan for future books. For a few hours last night, I wanted to just blow up the blog. I think I’m past that stage, thankfully. The sad thing is, Amazon doesn’t really care for their reviewers. And they definitely don’t care that I lost a ton of books that I didn’t get from them. If I had the option to not review there, I would. But being the giant retailer they are, authors favor them for reviews, which makes sense. These kinds of digital issues are just another example of why I prefer paperbacks.

Anyway, if you’ve made it this far reading, thanks for sticking with it. I just really needed to vent about the hell that is the Kindle app.