Book2Deck

Connect the Kindle over USB

What Book2Deck needs from the device and from the browser before it can read the words your Kindle saved.

Reading the Kindle directly works in a desktop Chromium browser — Chrome, Edge or another browser built on the same engine. It is the fastest route: no file manager, no copying, no looking for a path on the device.

If your browser or your operating system is not on that list, nothing is lost. The manual file route produces exactly the same cards.

Before you connect

  1. Use a data cable. Many USB-C cables shipped with chargers carry power only. If the device charges but never appears, this is the first thing to swap.
  2. Unlock the Kindle. A locked device answers the connection and then refuses to list its files. Book2Deck reports this as a locked device rather than as a failure.
  3. Close other MTP applications — Amazon’s Send to Kindle USB File Manager, OpenMTP, Android File Transfer. Only one program at a time can hold the USB interface.

Connecting

Open the importer and press Connect Kindle. The browser shows its own device picker: this permission prompt cannot be triggered from code without your click, which is why there is a button rather than an automatic scan.

Pick the Kindle in the list and confirm. Book2Deck opens an MTP session, looks for system/vocabulary/vocab.db, reads it and closes the session. On a Kindle Scribe the file is around 1.5 MB and the transfer takes a fraction of a second.

The device is opened read-only. Nothing is written back, nothing is deleted, and the Vocabulary Builder on the Kindle is left exactly as it was.

What can go wrong

The picker is empty. The cable is charge-only, or the Kindle is still showing the lock screen.

“Another application is using the device.” Something else holds the MTP interface. Close the file manager and press Connect again.

“Your operating system is holding the device.” On Windows the MTP stack lives in the kernel and does not hand the interface to a browser. This is not a bug you can work around from a web page: use the manual file route, which on Windows is the easy one — the Kindle shows up in Explorer as an ordinary drive.

The connection drops mid-read. Reconnect and press Connect again. A partial read is discarded rather than parsed; there is no half-imported state to clean up.

See compatibility for what has actually been tested, and troubleshooting for the full list of messages.

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