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Kindle Fire Handles Archived Books Differently Than Other Kindles

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While spending Thanksgiving with family, my wife’s aunt asked a question regarding something I took for granted having to do with the location of all of her old Kindle books on the new Kindle Fire. She, like many new Fire owners, collected dozens of eBooks on her old black and white Kindle. When she ordered the new Fire she was upset that “they automatically installed all of my old books” on her new Fire and she couldn’t remove them. I was surprised because that didn’t happen to me. She then asked, “How do I archive books and where is the archive? I can’t find it.”

The nomenclature for locally stored versus cloud stored books changed with the Fire and this confused my wife’s Aunt. She looked in the Books tab of the Fire and the Cloud section listed all of her books. She mistakenly thought those were installed on her Fire.

In case you’re in the same situation, let me explain the difference between the way black and white Kindles and the Fire handle books stored locally and in the cloud. First, some background. The old Kindle had two categories of storage. Locally stored books show up on the home screen. Any book that isn’t locally stored shows up in a section called archived, listed last on the home screen (see the white Kindle on the left below). To get your old books on your Kindle you open the archived books section and select the book to download it, and it is transferred to the home screen.

Older Kindles Archive is Now Cloud on Kindle Fire

With the Fire there is no section called Archived. Instead you have two tabs on the Books screen – Cloud and Device (see the Fire above right). Think of Cloud as Archived Items and Device as the locally stored books. To move a book from the Cloud to the Device just tap it.

Once you are finished reading a book you can remove it from the Fire by tapping and hold till the pop up menu appears. Tap on remove and the book no longer takes up local storage but will be listed in the Cloud section.

Also the Store tab in the upper right takes you to the Kindle eBook store. There you can buy or sample books. You can also take advantage of the free book borrowing feature where you get to download selected books and read them so long as you finish within a month. Not all books are available for one month borrowing, and you have to be an Amazon Prime member.

10 Comments

10 Comments

  1. Bikecox

    11/27/2011 at 5:18 am

    Actually you can keep the loaned book as long as you want, but you can only get one book a month and you have to return the book you have out before you can get another one on loan.

  2. Pontooner

    12/09/2011 at 9:48 am

    How does one remove books from Cloud?

  3. Doonney

    03/07/2012 at 5:50 am

    Same question…How do I remove books from cloud?

  4. Turtle

    06/02/2012 at 2:35 pm

    I can’t get to my archived items On my kindle fire and I hust bought a new book that won’t download

    • charles lazarus

      06/07/2014 at 8:47 am

      downloaded books….went on cloud..how do I get access to these?

  5. laurel

    07/09/2012 at 8:42 pm

    I own a I phone and have kindle aph with I cloud

    How do I archive old titles?

  6. Jerry

    08/27/2014 at 9:23 am

    WHATS WITH ALL THESE BUILDIRECT ADS? The 1st one had an “X” to delete it, which I did, and now more and more of them. I visited their website a few weeks back, just checking out different types of railing. I had no idea they would follow me around like a little puppy dog trying to get me to buy, buy, buy. These type of ads are usually displayed over the information you want to read, and can’t. Between them, facebook, twitter, email and others, you can’t hardly search the net for the information you want without their individual logos cluttering up the space. MAJOR TURN OFF FOR REPEAT VISITS TO THIS WEB SITE. They are worse than Telemarketers. Some day they will learn that the majority of the public is TURNED OFF by their intrusions. I for one will never buy their products, nor use their services in any way.

  7. Amber

    12/27/2015 at 12:11 pm

    I’m still wondering how you delete books from the cloud is anyone else??

  8. Barbara

    04/28/2016 at 4:48 am

    There is no category “cloud” or “archive” on this Amazon Fire tablet running Fire OS 5.1.2. The question remains “how do you manage your collection of books between the cloud and archive.

  9. Maddy Couperus

    02/28/2017 at 11:47 am

    I am not knowledgeable when it comes to electronics. I have a Kindle Fire and archived some books some time back. Now I can’t figure out how to retrieve them. It sounds like I’m not alone. Please help me. I archived s

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