Saturday, March 19, 2011

Kindle: We were unable to download the book... please try again later

A few days ago I installed Kindle on my Mac Book Pro, then only after a couple days of using it I suddenly got this error and was not able to open any of the two books I had just bought, I was able to open the books just fine on my iPhone and iPad, but the Kindle for Mac kept giving me this error message no matter how many times I tried clicking; a search on Google gave me 3 results and no solutions, so I uninstalled the App and reinstalled, got nothing. I tried the Tools menu, manage your Kindle from the Kindle app which takes you to the amazon site, noticed the "your orders" at the bottom and the options to download the content, tried that a few times, still nothing, another thing I noticed on the Kindle app was that the title was something like "???????????????? Home", I knew something was messed up bad, but even reinstalling didn't fix it, so in one last desperate attempt I checked out the Kindle preferences [Command]+, or under the Kindle menu, preferences, I clicked the only button there: "Deregister", agreed to the warning and selected "remove all licensed content from this device" and clicked "deregister" again on the warning window; a register button then showed up, I clicked it to register the app again, had to agree to some other warning, and that right there was the solution, I was able to get my books (had to download them again) and start reading, so I'm just leaving this out there in hopes it can help someone else; long story short, deregister the app, make sure to select "remove all licensed content from this device", then register again.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is exactly the problem I was having. thanks for posting this!

Anonymous said...

This was very helpful, but unfortunately did not work for me. What i did was - (1) Uninstall Kindle for Mac; (2) Remove the Kindle folder in the following path on my Mac: Home>>Library>>Application Support; (3) Reinstall Kindle for Mac; (4) Enter registration information when prompted.

I hope this works for others as an alternate means.

Daniel Smith said...

thanks for posting this! this worked for me!

Anonymous said...

had this problem. Could not find the answer on Amazon page. You solved it for me. thank you.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for posting this! The exact same thing happened to me after a catastrophic crash while running R and Kindle at the same time.

noe lee said...

Sigh. It didn't work for me. My problem is with Kindle for PC, not Mac. I guess it's a different problem with the PC.

Anonymous said...

Thanks! This worked for me after looking all over the internet to find a fix.

Anonymous said...

Thanks, this put me on the right track. I couldn't download a newly purchased book to my Mac, but it worked fine on the Ipad. De- and reregistering didn't work, so I removed the app, the Kindle folder in Application Support and the plist-file in Preferences. Then I redownloaded the app from Amazon and installed it. It turned out that it was a new version so that could be the reason the old one didn't work.
/Marianne

Anonymous said...

Had this problem too.

I changed the name of the "device" for my Kindle for my under manage devices on the amazon web site. Quit kindle for mac and relaunched.

I then noticed the name did not change on the app on my mac.

I then deleted the app only, downloaded kindle for mac from amazon and reinstalled it.

The name WAS changed now when I opened kindle and it works now.

Anonymous said...

Had the same problem on my mac (probably after having switched to a new mac). The de-regsiter, re-register solution worked for me too. Thanks!

Anonymous said...

Woah, scary! Can't believe this article is nearly a year old, and is still possibly useful. I de-registered OK, and lost half of my books, but am unable to remove the Kindle app itself, and start again, because "The item “Kindle” can’t be moved to the Trash because it can’t be deleted."
Any ideas?....

Anonymous said...

thanks it worked for me too :)

Anonymous said...

hi all the trick for me was to remove kindle app from mac and install it back...