I read a great many ‘throw away’ books, with that defined as, I read them (enjoyed or not) and now I have no further interest in them or use for them. Go away now, please. Stop clogging up my ‘library’ page and making it difficult to spot the books I have yet to read.
So far as I can tell, there is no way to delete books from the PC kindle app. On my kindle itself, it’s a simple command, no trouble. Pick ‘delete from this device’ and it’s gone, bingo. But on the computer? There simply isn’t a ‘delete’ type option. The books seem to be immortal.
Even when it’s a library loan, and the text is gone after the loan expiration, the title/cover image hangs around forever. If I go to my account on Amazon, I can select the title and then pick delete…and it sometimes works. Sometimes. Other times it has no effect. A few times it has changed the cover icon used to some generic image with the title and ‘expired loan’ rather than the original picture BUT it’s still there, occupying a slot on the screen, though now it alphabetically sorts in the "E"s rather than what the title is. (Huh? Who imagined that is a reasonable idea?)
I tried creating a ‘collection’ called Trash and putting these unwanted books in there. Which ‘works’ in the sense I can switch to that collection and see all these unwanted books there…but they are all ALSO listed in the main library page. (Unlike on the kindle, where putting a book into a category removes its listing from the generic top level one.)
I figured it out. If you download the book/PDF/file to your device, and keep the view switched to “Downloaded”, then you should only see the items you currently want to see. When you’re done with them, click and hold (or possibly right click) on the book from the library level, and you’ll get a list of options. One of them is “Remove Book”. It will be gone from your device. If you switch back to “Cloud”, then you’ll still see it unless you log into the site and use their content management system to permanently delete it. As you note, that is not always effective.
Huh! I’d never understood what the ‘downloaded’ option meant. Thought it was for books you got from some way other than Amazon. Like DLs direct from authors or other sites or transferred from friends or whatever.
I’ll have to check it out – though I seem to feel there are some books I still want to read that don’t show up in the downloaded category. Maybe the ones I sent direct to my kindle, vs straight to the PC or the ones I ‘transferred’ by USB to the kindle. Hmm. Many options to explore.
Anyway, many thanks for the possible ray of light!
(Though I still think they should include a simple ‘delete this book’ as an option. They synch which page you’ve read to up to the Amazon mastermind, why not ‘she don’t want this book anymore’?
It depends on whether it’s a book you got from Amazon or from elsewhere.
If it came from Amazon, one of the options will be “Remove from Device.” If you select this, you will no longer have a copy of that book on your device (in this case, the hard drive of your PC); but Amazon still remembers that you own the book, it’s still part of “All” your kindle books, and you can re-download it any time you like, from any app/device that’s registered to your account. If you want to delete the book permanently from your account, so that you no longer have any access to it, I think there’s a way to do that from Amazon’s website, but I don’t think you can do it from within the PC kindle app.
If the book came from elsewhere, one of the options is “Delete Book.” Once you do that, it’s gone, unless you have a backup copy elsewhere or can re-download it from wherever you first got it from. But that’s up to you.