Troubleshooting
Every message Book2Deck can show, what causes it, and what to do next.
Connecting to the device
Your browser cannot talk to USB devices. WebUSB is missing. That means Safari, Firefox or any mobile browser. Use the manual file route.
This page is not running over HTTPS. WebUSB is only available in a secure context.
No device was chosen. The browser’s picker was dismissed. Press Connect again.
No Kindle was found. Usually a charge-only cable, or a device still on the lock screen. Swap the cable, unlock the Kindle, reconnect.
Another application is using the device. A file manager holds the USB interface — Send to Kindle USB File Manager, OpenMTP, Android File Transfer. Close it and retry.
Your operating system is holding the device. Typical on Windows, where MTP lives in the kernel. Retrying will not help; pick the file by hand instead. On Windows that is the easy route anyway.
The Kindle is locked. Unlock the screen and press Connect again.
The device disconnected. The cable came out, or the Kindle went to sleep mid-transfer. A partial read is discarded rather than parsed, so there is nothing to clean up. Reconnect and start over.
The transfer timed out. Try a different cable or a direct port rather than a hub.
Finding the database
No vocabulary database on the device. system/vocabulary/vocab.db is missing. Either
the dictionary has never been used on this Kindle, or the device stores its files somewhere
this version does not know about. The diagnostic report is the useful thing to send.
The file is too large. A vocabulary database is normally a few megabytes. A file far outside that range is almost certainly not the right one.
Reading the file
This is not a SQLite database. The file does not begin with a SQLite signature. If you
picked it by hand, check that you took vocab.db and not a backup or an unrelated file.
This database has an unfamiliar layout. The file is valid SQLite, but the tables are not the ones a Kindle vocabulary database has. A future firmware could do this; the diagnostic report says which tables were found.
The vocabulary is empty. The database exists and parses, but contains no lookups. Look up a word on the Kindle first.
Warnings that do not stop the import
Unsaved changes on the device. A vocab.db-wal file sits next to the database, so the
newest handful of lookups may not be in the file yet. Eject the Kindle properly and the
device usually folds them in.
Some book titles are missing. The lookups are there, but the device did not store metadata for every book. Those words import with an empty Book field.
No learned/unlearned information. This database has no column marking words as learned, so that filter is hidden rather than shown doing nothing.
Some dates look wrong. Individual timestamps fall outside a plausible range and are left empty rather than guessed.
Exporting
Nothing is selected. An export of zero notes would produce a file Anki reads as broken, so it is refused. Select at least one word.
This browser will not store anything locally. Private mode, or storage blocked in settings. Everything still works; the only thing lost is the local record of what you have already exported.
The diagnostic report
If something is wrong, the importer can produce a diagnostic report. It contains device identifiers, the schema that was detected, table names, counts and error codes.
It deliberately does not contain your words, your contexts, your book titles or your device’s serial number. You can read the whole thing before deciding to share it.
Last updated