# Books won't delete - they just go grey



## audax (Sep 6, 2010)

On my Paperwhite, I have a lot of books which I can't delete.  Instead of the titles disappearing, they just grey out and remain, cluttering up my collections.  These are mostly (perhaps all) books that I have added manually - books purchased from Amazon delete correctly.

Is there a solution to this annoying problem?

michael


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## KimberlyinMN (Dec 30, 2009)

That's what all of my titles do. They go grey to indicate they are still available to be downloaded. I just move them to a collection called "Finished".


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## audax (Sep 6, 2010)

I guess that would work but it's a very primitive approach - ultimately, I'll have thousands of dead books in the Finished collection.  Is there really no way to get rid of them?

michael


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## KimberlyinMN (Dec 30, 2009)

I don't think there's any other way. Well, you can delete them via the Amazon store under the Devices and Content, but that is permanent.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

audax said:


> On my Paperwhite, I have a lot of books which I can't delete. Instead of the titles disappearing, they just grey out and remain, cluttering up my collections. These are mostly (perhaps all) books that I have added manually - books purchased from Amazon delete correctly.
> 
> Is there a solution to this annoying problem?
> 
> michael


Michael,

you're saying these are NOT books that you purchased from Amazon, but sideloaded?

Betsy


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

audax said:


> I guess that would work but it's a very primitive approach - ultimately, I'll have thousands of dead books in the Finished collection. Is there really no way to get rid of them?
> 
> michael


You can take them out of _any_ collection. Then if you don't show 'on device' you'll not see them in the home page. And of course they wont' show in the collection because you took them out of it.

It's a 'feature'of the STOOPID implementation of cloud collections.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Will books that are NOT from Amazon stay in collections after they've been deleted?  'Cause Michael says they're books that he manually added.

Michael, have you connected via WiFi and done a sync?

Betsy


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

I have books I added via send to kindle.

I do generally put them in one of my three collections. 

I should note I usually have my home page showing "On Device", "My Items", and "Collections".  This puts those three collections at the top and all uncollected books following. Those would be, essentially, my TBR queue.

When one of my personal docs is in a collection, and I delete it, it stays in the collection but shows as grayed out.  If I go to the collection and to one of those and long press, I can 'add to collection' or 'add to home'. 

If I 'add to home' what it does is download it; it leaves it in the current collection and now it's shown in dark print. If I, then, do 'add to 'collection', I can actually take it OUT of the current collection by unchecking the box. (This is hugely counter-intuitive and should totally be changed, fwiw.) Now it's no longer in the collection but free floating on my home page. NOW if I delete it (remove from device), it goes away entirely.

If I do the collection manipulation before re-downloading a previously 'deleted' personal document, it never does show up on the home page.

Again, these are things I've gotten on my device using the Send to Kindle app from my computer.


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## audax (Sep 6, 2010)

Wow - I'm overwhelmed with solutions and pseudo-solutions.  Just to confirm - these are books that I've side-loaded, sometimes emailed, sometimes dragged to the Documents folder.  I've done synchs and I've re-booted - neither helps.

What DOES work, and thank you so much Ann in Arlington, is (when a greyed-out book is in a collection), go into Add/Remove and uncheck its box.  This involves scrolling through 73 pages of books but I can do it quickly as I'm looking for existing big ticks.  I've deleted a dozen books so far and I'm hoping I can get rid of the rest.  It's a bit like clicking on START in Windows when you want to stop.

michael


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## audax (Sep 6, 2010)

Final comment - I've disposed of all greyed-out books from all collections and I'm very happy - thanks guys.  I suspect that part of the problem may have been that I had books in more than one collection but I'll leave the investigation of that to another day.

michael


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## MagicalWingLT (May 12, 2009)

> I should note I usually have my home page showing "On Device", "My Items", and "Collections". This puts those three collections at the top and all uncollected books following. Those would be, essentially, my TBR queue.


Thank you! This topic has helped me figure out things on my new Paperwhite. Learning how to do the collections, having it show up on my device on the screen was a hassle. Now why does it show Stars on the right side of the screen?


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

As I understand it (and, again, I've only got the one so am not 100% how it works with more than one device) a star associates that collection with that device. So if you unstar it, it maybe won't show on that device's home page -- you'd have to switch to 'cloud' to find it and star it.


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## Vicki G. (Feb 18, 2010)

Thanks!  I'm still trying to remember how to do this.  Had everything good or I should say as good as I could get it and then I got this new Basic and I was completely at a loss.  I had made some new Collections on the Basic and was surprised they weren't showing up on the PW2.  Tried Sync but that did no good.  Duh!  Went to Cloud, changed from "Show Only in Collections" to "Show in All Views" and the collections were there and starred.  Kinda goofy and....  uhhh... totally non-intuitive but what can I say.  At least in the end I got where I needed to go.


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## MagicalWingLT (May 12, 2009)

Yeah it took me forever last night so I know how a lot of people will feel when they get a new device and don't know how the new layout works. The star thing does look goofy. At first I thought I was doing something wrong lol


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## Vicki G. (Feb 18, 2010)

MagicalWingLT said:


> Yeah it took me forever last night so I know how a lot of people will feel when they get a new device and don't know how the new layout works. The star thing does look goofy. At first I thought I was doing something wrong lol


Oh, I didn't mean the stars are goofy - although they do seem to be something I could well do without. Just that the whole "cloud collections" process is goofy because it is so non-intuitive, if that's a word.


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## cork_dork_mom (Mar 24, 2011)

I much prefer the way collections and books were displayed on the Kindle 3 (keyboard). If you wanted a book on the device, you added it. If you didn't want a book on the device, you deleted it. Easy peasy. 

Not a fan of how books are displayed on the PW. I really don't want to see everything in my cloud. I have a "finished" collection that has everything - I was getting confused on what I had read and what I hadn't. With that being said - I do like the with recent update that there is a reading progress bar so you can tell quickly if you've read through a book.


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## MagicalWingLT (May 12, 2009)

Yes that's the one thing I miss about the K3


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