How to Delete Books From Kindle

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Updated August 26, 2019

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The Amazon Kindle is a great tool for carrying around hundreds of books, but there's a limit to how many it will hold. This guide explains how to delete books from your Kindle to free up on-device storage space. It also describes how to delete books permanently from your Amazon account, in case there's something from your literary past you'd rather forget.

How to Remove Books From Kindle

Here's how to delete a book from your Amazon Kindle.

Turn on your device. On the Home screen, select Your Library.
Press and hold on the book you want to delete.
Select Remove From Device.

To remove a book permanently from your Kindle device and your Amazon account, instead of Remove From Device, select Delete This Book. Then follow the steps below to delete a book from your Amazon account.

How to Delete Books Permanently From Your Amazon Account

When you remove a book from your Kindle, it still exists in your Amazon account, and still appears on your device in the ALL category of Your Library. You may want to keep some books in this state to download again later (see below for instructions on how to re-download). But, if you want to delete a book from your account entirely, here's how.

On a computer, open a browser and type amazon.com into the address bar.
Amazon.com opens. In the top-right area of the screen, hover your cursor over Account & Lists. Select Your Content and Devices.
The Manage Your Content and Devices screen opens. In the Select column, select the checkboxes to the left of the books you want to delete.
Toward the top of the screen select Delete.
A dialog box appears, asking if you really want to delete. Select Yes, delete permanently.

Once a book is permanently deleted there's no way to retrieve it. To get it back on your Kindle you would have to repurchase it.

Amazon.com with book deletion dialog box displayed

How to Re-download Books to Your Kindle Library

If you've deleted a book only on your Kindle, and not on Amazon, it still exists on Amazon's cloud. Therefore, you can re-download it onto your device. This can be done either on your Kindle or through Amazon. Here's how to do it on your device.

Turn on your Kindle. On the Home screen, select Your Library.
Select ALL.
Select the book you wish to re-download.

You can repeat the process of removing a book from your device, and re-downloading it as many times as you want to free up memory space when you don't need a particular book. If you want to re-download a book from Amazon, here's how.

On a computer, open a browser and type amazon.com into the address bar.
Amazon.com opens. In the top-right area of the screen, hover your cursor over Account & Lists. Select Your Content and Devices.
The Manage Your Content and Devices screen opens. Next to the book you want to re-download, select the Actions button.
In the dialog box, select your preferred Deliver to option.
A Deliver dialog box appears. Select Deliver.