Universalis

 

An Amazon error message

August 2022

As part of their continuing policy of customer experience improvement, Amazon have changed the way their Personal Documents service works.

1. They are using a different, industry standard format for the Personal Documents you send them (or we send them on your behalf).
2. Sometimes the system works and you get the e-book on your Kindle in about 20 minutes. Sometimes nothing at all happens for precisely 1 hour 15 minutes and then Amazon send you the following email:

There was a problem with the document(s) you sent to Kindle
Dear Kindle Customer,
The following document, sent by you at 04:24 AM on Wed, Aug 24, 2022 GMT , could not be delivered to the address you specified: * Universalis-202252.epub


This message is followed by a list of reasons why a document might not be suitable. None of these reasons apply to the document that was sent. The "sent by you" time is never the time at which the document was sent, but always 1 hour 15 minutes after it.

We have made some experiments, and:

• All tests indicate that there is nothing wrong with the document that was sent. We have tried standard ePub verification software, and we have tried loading the document into Amazon’s own Kindle Previewer 3 program. Everything works perfectly.
• The identical document sent to Amazon at different times will sometimes work and sometimes fail.

This is therefore a problem with Amazon’s systems.

What to do about this

Amazon offer no support at all for their Personal Documents service, so there is no way for us to report this bug to them.

Here are some other things you can try.

• If you have sent your e-book by email to your @kindle.com address, try using Amazon’s “Send to Kindle” service instead: this lets you send a file straight to their website, or install a program on your computer to send it for you.
• You can avoid the Personal Documents service altogether. Create an e-book using your own computer, plug your Kindle into your computer and transfer the file to it. Follow the links you will find in this page. This will work only with an actual Kindle device.
• If you are not using a Kindle device, but a Kindle app on Kindle Fire, Amazon Fire, Android, iOS, etc, use a Universalis app directly on your device instead of creating e-books to read on it. The format is better, and you avoid all the trouble of creating e-books. You can read about the apps here.
• It is impossible for us to say what Amazon bug is making their Personal Documents process fail, but it is just possible that larger or more complex Personal Documents are harder for them to process. (The Liturgy of the Hours for a half-year can easily contain 1,000 chapters). So if, for example, you are creating half-year e-books, you can try creating one-month ones instead.