Books Deleted From Kindle and Not In Readwise Sync/Download into Obsidian

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When I sync Kindle Highlights in Obsidian, books that I have deleted from the Kindle Library and which also do not appear in Readwise continue to appear in Obsidian/Readwise/Books. If I delete the books from Readwise/Books by right-clicking and selecting delete, on the next sync the books return like zombies coming back from the dead.

Can someone please save me from madness and explain this phenomena and tell me how to get books to stop syncing/downloading into Obsidian when they have been deleted, both in Kindle and Obsidian, and do not appear in Readwise?

To further complicate this, but to give further background in case this helps find a solution, the libraries of Kindle, Readwise and Obsidian do not match up.

There are 142 books in Kindle (Manage Your Content and Devices/Content), although Chrome Kindle shows there are only 131 books (Amazon Kindle: Your free personal library you can take anywhere).

Furthermore, there are only 24 Kindle books in the Readwise Library (Readwise).

And finally, there are 86 books in Obsidian/Readwise/Books.

In Obsidian, if I click on Highlight link in a book I deleted or that does not appear in Kindle Library gives an error message, “not found in archive”. Why would the book appear showing Highlights if the book has been deleted and cannot be found in the archive?

I thought maybe there were books stuck in memory, so in Obsidian, I tried to Sign Out of Kindle Highlights. It appeared to sign out of Kindle because the menu popped up to log back into Amazon, but in Obsidian the Sign Out button continues to say it’s still trying to log out and if I click the button it says unable to log out. Inconclusive.

I would greatly appreciate some help as I’m out of ideas. Thank you.

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There’s absolutely no need for the Kindle Highlights plugin if you are a Readwise user. Just use the Readwise Official Plugin, otherwise you are doubling up.

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Thank you so much for your helpful comment. This helped me resolve my problem, which is a great relief. It seems obvious not to have two programs doing the same thing, but I had tried this, and since it didn’t resolve the problem, I mistakenly put it back and, in my confusion, I forgot about it.

With the clarity of your comment, I was able to resolve my issue by first deleting all the books I don’t want from Obsidian one last time, then going to the Readwise Library and deleting all the highlights, one by one, unfortunately, as I didn’t see any way to delete more than one highlight or bookmark at a time, then Refresh Highlights, which removed the book from Readwise. Some of the books had indeed gotten stuck and the highlights could not be removed; the only way to remove them was to either remove the book from Readwise or Kindle. Once I did this for all the books I didn’t want, in Readwise, I clicked Sync Highlights. Then, in Obsidian, in Readwise Official, I clicked Initiate Sync.

Voila! Problem solved. Thank you again, I really appreciate your help.

2 Likes
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Glad you were able to resolve your problem and thanks for describing what you did step by step so the next person with a similar problem can find this. You can mark your post above as the solution to this topic to give it the green checkmark.

Have a nice day.

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Right, I was hoping that would help someone. Thank you.

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Out of curiosity, why would you want to delete books?

Alright, some books aren’t worth our time, but i don’t think you would remove great books as well?
Maybe the kinds of books read were “just” some nice entertaining read like, novels?

Or maybe technical books, but in this case you’d have absorbed contents so quickly that removing books is a totally normal step to you. Which would make me reconsider how good my learning techniques are :thinking:

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One of the reasons is some of the books in my Kindle Library are many years old and I have no interest in them any more. Also, I am setting up Obsidian for work on specific themes. Many of those books do not relate to those themes. And finally, I’m on the Family Plan for Kindle, and my wife’s books appear in the same Library, and I want to remove them. I believe there is a way to separate books from one member of the family to the other, but I never got that far because it was easier to delete them either from Obsidian, or altogether from Kindle, as she was no longer interested in many of them.

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