I’m astonished to report that the vertical-orientation thing worked for me as well.
I’m not sure my situation was quite like everybody else’s though. When I started, the battery *did* show the lightning bolt and gave the impression it was charging, but it never went past 1%. For reasons clear in the details below, I was pretty sure the battery was ruined. But stumbled across this post and figured, what the hey, I’ll give it a try! At first it didn’t seem to make a difference, but at some point suddenly it went past 1% to 2 and now to 5. So I think our Kindle is going to be another success story of this weird and improbable solution.
I was in the middle of researching what replacement Kindle to get. But I was disappointed to see the new Kindle 8” kids’ edition tablets are being panned for being slow, and I don’t relish having to pay again to turn off all the cosmetics ads and stuff like that anyway, so I’m delighted that this Kindle may be a survivor after all.
DETAILS: My situation is that my daughter (who has severe autism) brought the Kindle in the bath with her b/c we somehow missed hiding it away the way we usually do. After my outpouring of relief that she hadn’t been shocked by the battery, I shook all the water I could out of it, and threw it in a bag of rice with a few drying packets over the weekend. I wish it had a user-openable back because I could hear the Kindle struggling— it kept trying to reboot itself over and over and I wished I could just take the battery out to prevent damage, but with the glued on back I figured I risked doing more damage doing this than I’d prevent. Eventually it seemed to run the battery down (probably way down) with this and I didn’t hear more from it. I checked at about 24 hours and saw there were still moisture droplets visible behind the camera lenses even a day later, so I put it in the sun (still in the rice) for a half hour at a time on each side for a while, hoping to heat it enough to evaporate the liquid and let it escape (but not get so hot as to melt the plastic). That was a delicate balance. After 48 hours it did start successfully when plugged in, and I thought at first it was fine, but when an hour of being plugged in didn’t get the battery past 1%, I figured the battery was ruined. I was just in the middle of researching what replacement Kindle to get when I stumbled across this post and gave it a try. I am really surprised to say this but it does seem to be working. It’s possible my battery as just so depleted that it took a long time just to get above 1%, but I don’t think so— the first night I attempted to recharge it I had it plugged in for over an hour and it never went past 1%— but this time, vertically, it only took it a few minutes to break the 1% barrier. So I think it’s the vertical orientation. This breaks every law I thought I understood about electronics, but I’m thankful to whoever figured this out.