It looks Amazon has bestowed yet another bug onto Kindle software with their recent software updates. There are a growing number of reports online about Kindles showing an “Invalid ASIN” error when trying to open certain ebooks, making it impossible to open those books.
It sounds like it only happens with sideloaded books, but I haven’t encountered the error on any of my Kindles so I can’t confirm that. Amazon Staff members on the official Amazon forum keep posting the same canned response saying they are aware of the problem and their technical team is looking into it.
They’ve also been aware of the bug that deletes all sideloaded ebooks if you keep your Kindle in airplane mode for too long, and they haven’t bothered to fix that after 4 years so who knows if they’ll ever get around to fixing this new bug. If it only affects sideloaded books they might not care enough to fix it.
People have found a workaround to deal with the Invalid ASIN error. It’s not a fix exactly, but it’ll let you open your books so you can actually read them. Here are the steps:
How to Bypass Invalid ASIN Error
- Turn on airplane mode.
- Instead of tapping the book cover to open the ebook, tap the three dots next to the book (or the three dots on the lower right corner of the cover in grid view), and select “Go To” to open the first chapter of the book.
- Now the book should work fine and open normally when tapping the cover to open it.
I’ve seen some people saying factory resetting their Kindle got the books to work again, but that’s a lot of extra work to go through.
Hopefully Amazon will release another software update to fix the problem soon. But at this point they’re just as likely to break something else. Kindle software has been getting steadily buggier lately. The recent updates broke Kids Mode on my Kindles, VoiceView has been broken for a while, sideloaded ebooks have been getting randomly deleted for years, but Kindles have a new page view that looks like Kindle apps now so it’s all for a good cause (sarcasm).
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