Syncing your own eBooks between PCs and Android

[joseph.carty]

Has anyone else gotten the non-drm books that are not on amazon to sync the way explained above?

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by joseph.carty

Has anyone else gotten the non-drm books that are not on amazon to sync the way explained above?

Anyone who follows the instructions above and converts a book to mobi with calibre will have success. I'm guessing the person that had troubles wasn't using a version of calibre that was current enough at the time so was not successful.

The only thing that will prevent you form being successful is if during conversion, in the Mobi ouput settings, you check the Enable sharing book content via Facebook option. This will break allowing your sideloaded book to sync.

Page syncing of books converted to mobi via calibre is not an experiment that might go wrong or give you problems it just plain works.

[ghostyjack]

Nope, I was using the latest version of Calibre for the conversions. And as I don't use Facebook, I don't check that option.

I never did figure out what was going wrong, but as most of my reading material is in epub, I'm not too worrried out it.

[Korbi]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

Anyone who follows the instructions above and converts a book to mobi with calibre will have success. I'm guessing the person that had troubles wasn't using a version of calibre that was current enough at the time so was not successful.

The only thing that will prevent you form being successful is if during conversion, in the Mobi ouput settings, you check the Enable sharing book content via Facebook option. This will break allowing your sideloaded book to sync.

Page syncing of books converted to mobi via calibre is not an experiment that might go wrong or give you problems it just plain works.

Does the kindle app only enable page sync or is it also possible to sync annotations, highlighted text and bookmarks?

I am using moon+reader on my android phone and have been eagerly waiting for a syncing solution. Is there somewhere are detailed tutorial for this?

[Dangles]

The Aldiko (www.aldiko.com) ebook reader is excellent and allows you to add your own content, but I believe it's only available in the Android market... so it doesn't fully answer the question of full syncing. Plus it only reads EPUB and PDF files. But it does allow you to add anything from your SD card, and you can have your Dropbox account store items on your SD card. In fact that might be the default for Dropbox.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Korbi

Does the kindle app only enable page sync or is it also possible to sync annotations, highlighted text and bookmarks?

For mobi files converted with calibre I believe only pages get synced. For books bought through Amazon it might (I have no clue) sync all of the above.

Originally Posted by Korbi

I am using moon+reader on my android phone and have been eagerly waiting for a syncing solution. Is there somewhere are detailed tutorial for this?

I'm not sure what you're looking for. A tutorial for ???? The posts earlier in this thread layout the Kindle syncing using books converted to mobi via calibre.

[junecaz]

Same issue here. I'm trying, as was instructed in this topic, convert my files to .mobi with Calibre (latest version) and my pages do not synchronize with PC -> Smartphone (Android Device)

[luqmaninbmore]

I've been able to synch my calibre converted books with the Kindle App. I just copy the books via drop box to the kindle folder on my tablet and my phone and they stay in synch just fine. If only I could 'upload' my own books to the Kindle cloud reader...

[jduck]

Reviving an old thread here because this is something I'd love to be able to do.

For anyone that has this working, can you go into a little more detail on what you're doing? Here's what I am trying:

1. Convert book to mobi using calibre (it's not the newest but it is 0.8.3 which is newer than this thread by nearly a year -- actually have the same results with 0.9.5 64-bit). The 'share with facebook' option is not checked.

2. Email the book to my me@kindle.com address. It shows up in my kindle library under personal documents.

3. Sync in the android app, and I can see my book.

4. Sync in the Kindle for PC program, I can't see my book.

5. Copy the mobi file over to my kindle content directory, restart kindle for pc. Now I can see my book.

But the furthest read location is not synced (and indeed, why should it be, since the kindle program didn't get the book from Amazon's servers?).

What step am I missing there?

[bemymonkey]

Hi, has anyone figured this out? Adding the converted-by-Calibre MOBI file on the desktop app also doesn't work... I can sync all I want and for the life of me can't get the file to even show up in the Kindle app for Android...

[donald1x]

Sorry to add to an old thread, but I see this one ends unanswered.

I've sync hundreds of my calibre ebooks with my Kindle (1 device, 4 android, 1 iPad) and I use a slightly different route.

I know calibre has a device sync option, but honestly I never used it. I use the "my own document archive" capability of kindle to read documents I generated and store it in the cloud. Then each of the kindle I have (for the family) can download just the books they want to read.

Each kindle device and android/iPad app has an email address randomly generated that looks like: kindle_xxxx@kindle.com. You can see this in the setting of each kindle device/app, and you can see it if you browse to amazon.com

Click:
- Your Account (a menu tab near the upper right side)
- Manage Your Kindle (from the drop down menu)
This will open a page showing all your documents (not just one purchased from kindle).

Click:
- Manage your Devices (from the navigation menu on the left)
This will list all your kindle devices and the email address associated with each. (Note that you can change your kindle email address, see the instruction there)

Now any .mobi (actually also .pdf) file sent to ANY ONE of this email address ends up in your personal document archive, AND is ALSO whisper-sync to the one specific device that email is associated with.

So, get calibre to generate .mobi files (fixing any meta data first, if you can, it keeps your library/document archive clean) and email those to your kindle.

Incidentally. any of your other kindle devices/app can find these documents by choosing to browse "all Items" or "in the Cloud" (different app refers to them differently).

Done, and I hope this helps.

[donald1x]

Originally Posted by luqmaninbmore

I've been able to synch my calibre converted books with the Kindle App. I just copy the books via drop box to the kindle folder on my tablet and my phone and they stay in synch just fine. If only I could 'upload' my own books to the Kindle cloud reader...

Just to add to my previous post (which is (was?) still awaiting moderation)

Yes, you can upload your own book to the cloud ARCHIVE, but no, you can't seem to read it in the cloud READER (the browser based one). you can, however, download anything in the ARCHIVE to each of your reader, including, i think, not tested, a Kindle PC reader.

Do this by emailing the .mobi file (and a few other formats) to your device's kindle_xxxx@kindle.com email account.

Oh, yeah, I noted that your Kindle PC and Kindle Cloud Reader doesn't get a kindle email account. You need to install a kindle app in either an android or an ipad.

See YOUR list of registered kindle devices here

[fencepost]

I'm using a different mechanism with epub books - Dropbox or Box.com folders on the PC, plus a package called FolderSync on all of my Android devices to sync those folders to the device. Dropbox sync seems to work best, but that may be a case of the particular package - there are multiple pieces of software that can so the same thing.

[Brianrh]

I read this thread through a few times and I'm a litstill tle confused. It seems to me that some replies are crossed purposed. Is everyone talking about being able to only have the same non Amazon sourced book on various devices and Kindle for PC, or having the book and last reading position synchronised?

I can synch all converted books and reading positions between my Android devices but I can only synch the books between them and my Kindle for PC. The only difference I have perhaps to others in this thread is that I am running Kindle for PC v1.4.1 in Wine on Linux Mint.

Sorry if I'm being a bit thick if someone could just clarify things for me.

Thanks.

Brian

[Brianrh]

I've just tried Kindle for PC on my Windows XP PC at work and I can't get last page read synching to work on that either. Looking on the internet I found reference to having to change [PDOC] to [EBOK] in the Calibre MOBI output conversion section to get an Amazon type ASIN number created. The theory was that if you then emailed this to your device it would get registered on the Amazon database and everything should then synch correctly.

I had hoped that this would be the answer to my problems but last page read synching still seems to be avoiding me at the moment. Am I still missing something? Any suggestions from you folks who are have this working?

Thanks.

Brian