I’m going to skip the story of why I needed a library book on a PC and how my grandfather was a coal miner and get to the problem I faced yesterday – I needed a digital library book from my library to work on a PC. That just was not happening. Fine on Android, fine in a web browser. This was only on the Windows application.
TL;DR – check your Windows Security and see if Kindle app is being blocked
In general it’s been simple, open Kindle App for PC, it’s just there. What was happening however was I would see the cover of the book for a bit, then the book cover would disappear, and there was no way to open it. Just nothing happened.
No errors, jumping through reinstalling and tech support didn’t help. Just the book would never download. Some of my old books were still showing, but they’d expired. I checked out another book that required the Kindle reader (rather than downloading an epub,) and notice the same issue. I’d see the cover, a few seconds later it would disappear, no book.
My fix
I noticed that I had a Windows Security notification today. It was low priority, one of the hundreds of notifications I get a day and had gotten lumped pretty far down the list.
Windows Security was blocking the Kindle app from doing something, it was considered a low priority notification, didn’t manage to trigger any real warnings but did just stop Kindle from being able to write to the folder it wanted to.
I allowed Kindle folder access, everything started working. I do not know how it worked previously, but Windows Security kicked in at some point. Fixed now.
