Summary: you can keep your reading position synchronised across all your Kindle connected devices, even when re-reading a book you have read before.
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| Kindling |
Mark My Words
If you have a Kindle device (and even if you don’t), you may have been curious about the ability for it to remember your place on multiple machines – an automatic electronic bookmark, if you will.
This works very well the first time you read through a book. I have started books on my Kindle, read little bits from my iPod, after syncing it over the wifi at home, and occasionally read some from my desktop PC, via a browser window.
Each time, my progress has transferred perfectly from one place to another and the only thing I had to do was make sure  my device was synced once more before opening the book up again.
Even when I have forgotten to sync manually, there have been several times when I have opened the book, only to be reminded that I had read a little bit further and would I like to go to the “furthest page read”? Well, yes I would, thank you very much! How kind of you.
Photo Credit: My Fire by KCXD
Read It Again, Sam
The problems start when I want to re-read a book that I have previously finished. I have a couple of books which I like so much that I want to read them again …and again. And in this situation, it seems like the system suddenly falls apart – at least, that is how it appears at first.
Once or twice I’ve been offered to “move to the furthest read location”, only to find  myself at the very end of the book and then struggled to get back to where I was before.
Looking on the Kindle itself, there is nothing in the menus that allows you to set it back to the start (as though you have downloaded it for the first time).
Mr Fix It
However, there is a fix for this and you can find it on the Amazon website. Hopefully, Amazon will see fit to include this option directly on the Kindle device by upgrading the software at some point in the future.
in the meantime, you can reset your progress, by following these simple steps:
- Sign in and go to “your account” on Amazon and find the “manage your Kindle” area.
- Find the book within your list in the Kindle library.
- On the right hand side you will see a button next to the book, labelled “action”.
- Hover over the action button and you will see some options. Select “clear furthest page read…” (see screenshot below).
- Next go to the place where you most recently read from that book (most often, this will be on the Kindle device itself). Open the book, check you are in the right place, and then synchronise.
- That’s it! Try opening the same book from somewhere else, such as your web browser, and it should open in the same place.
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| Clear furthest page read |
Now you can enjoy your book – again!
Question:Â Did this work work for you or do you have an alternative method?
Let us know in the comments.
Thanks for your detailed comments and for sharing your feelings on the subject!
It’s always worked for me before, but it’s been a while since I last had to do it, so things may well have changed since then, and I appreciate you’ve had a frustrating time with it.
I hope your next endeavours will be more successful – perhaps outside the Amazon ecosystem!
Kind Regards,
Tim
This did not work for me. I also spent 2 days and at least 4 hours with 4 or 5 tech support people at Amazon who were also unable to get the “furthest page” to reset in my Moto G Stylus 2022 on ANY of the books I am re-reading. It’s running Kindle for Android version 8.89.3.0(2.0.2766.0), the most recent update as of November 2023. I’ve removed downloads from all other devices, deregistered & reregistered the phone, and “all the usual” fixes found over the past couple of weeks. I suspect there may be other combinations of “Mark as read”, “Mark as unread”, “Reset furthest page”, and removing, redownloading books, sliding the slider to the left, and other things to do that make the possible combinations of things to do geometrically harder to find the ONE that MIGHT work. I suspect that the only way that might work would be to have Amazon/Audible DELETE the book AND accompanying Audible narration from my LIBRARY and then replace them both with free copies since they seem unable to fix this bug. And I am equally skeptical that even that would work. I wonder i anyone but the creator of the Kindle App for Android even knows WHERE the “furthest page read” data is actually stored. Apparently, not at AWS because the reset has no effect on the last page data on the phone for books that have been completely read through at least once.
This is like the glitch in the 1978 TRS-80 Backgammon PC game that, if a player left two markers on each of the first 6 starting positions for his opponent, the game would get stuck because the other player, if they had a marker “on the bar” couldn’t make a move while they were blocked, but the game wasn’t programmed to allow anyone to force the blocked player to skip the turn where they couldn’t move. At least that program was written in BASIC and I was able to edit my copy to add an option to switch players turns when one player got their marker blocked on the bar.
Amazon just needs to have the developer add a “Set furthest page as __” some page number option INSIDE THE Kindle for Android App. It would probably only take one more line of code than the “Go to page” option that’s already there.
While they’re fixing that, they should also add an option to delete ALL of the bookmarks with ONE CLICK, instead of tediously one-by-one.
Meanwhile, Kindle fans who want to have Immersion Reading on their Windows PC’s have to run some Android emulator (like BlueStacks) and then run install the Kindle for Android App inside the emulation program. I’ve done that and it works well. Then I have Kindle with Immersion reading running inside the BlueStacks Android Emulator, playing on my 32″ PC monitor and nice speakers on my Windows PC. The BlueStacks Android Emulator sends some indicator that it’s some model of Android Phone that tricks the Kindle for Android app into allowing Immersion reading.
I’ve also read that Amazon is no longer working on developing Kindle for Windows App or Kindle for Windows PC because, I suppose, they figure that’s not where they’ll make any money. The Windows versions of Kindle don’t support Immersion reading.
And don’t get me started on Alexa’s TTS! Try having Alexa read the first sentence of the book “Through Wolf’s Eyes” by Jane Lindskold. It’s laughably pathetic. Alexa’s TTS does not know how to render strings of A’s and O’s as reasonable wolf howls like the human Audible narrators do. Also, the TTS never changes “voice” between different speakers in the stories like professional narrators.
Kindle and Audible – such great products with so much potential – and still too many bugs.