Had the strangest problem with my Kindle today. All of a sudden, my Recently Read Documents started showing up, well, backwards.

Not all of them – only the books I had recently read. So after I would read each book, it would disappear from the first page of my document listing.

At first I thought the books were being deleted, but I did a little searching and found that the book had moved to the last page of my Kindle’s document list.

A little more investigation showed that the date on these books had somehow been set to Jan 1, 1980. Now there’s a “default date” if I’ve ever seen one.

Rebooting the Kindle didn’t fix the problem.

I theorized that the Kindle Clock could be reset over Whispernet, the Kindle’s wireless connection. (I normally keep my Whispernet turned off, to extend battery life.) Turns out I was right.

I turned on the Whispernet connection in the Menu, then chose Menu->”Sync and check for items.” That did the trick – the clock was updated to the current time, and I opened each book, the book’s last access date was reset to the current date.

Note that you’ll have to re-open each item that had its date set back to Jan 1, 1980 to apply to the new settings to that book.

I should note that the problem started a day after I installed the Kindle Screen Saver hack, outlined here. I can’t say if it’s related or not, or if the problem was just caused by resetting the Kindle.