As you may know, I am rather fond of books. Not just fond of books, but perhaps overly fond of books. I read a lot and, as such, I acquire a lot of ebooks. Most of these are for review, but some are through Bookfunnel promotions and such.
I would download the books, open them on my dekstop kindle app and read away. Until this Monday…
For some unknown reason, the Kindle app for the desktop version of Mac no longer opens third-party .mobi files without crashing. I have tried to research this phenomenon, but the only relevant articles are from six or seven years ago, which is unhelpful. I then did what any computery person would do and redownloaded the kindle app, only to lose all the previously downloaded third-party books from this device.
Luckily for me, I keep all copies of these books in a folder on my computer. I also keep copies of them on a tablet computer where I have a different version of the kindle app. So far, I have been able to get documents to that app and have had no problems with it. But the desktop app? Nope! Only officially downloaded-from-Amazon books will show up there.
Okay, okay, fine.
But really, very annoying.
I have a feeling that this issue comes from the fact that Apple recently released a new OS (Big Sur) and a lot of applications are having to shift over to the new system. This usually results in a large number of bugs and issues with software on the old OS, and the new, which is why I tend to wait about four to five months before updating to the new system. Unfortunately, I think Amazon may have jumped the gun and made things problematic for themselves with people trying to read “personal documens” (as these are classified, being third-party).
In any case, there are fixes and I can always read a different format for a while. I just have this weirdly unrealistic wish that software would do what you expect it to do on a consistent basis. Of course, if it did that, then the world would be a vastly different place and I would probably be far less cynical of technology than I am, now.
Oh, well. I must have something about which to complain, and the weather doesn’t seem to care at all that I wish for snow.
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