I think my better half grew tired of my (not-so) subtle hints that I want a Kindle Touch for Christmas because she broke down and told me that I am, indeed, getting one. Yay!
Of course this also means I now need to take the time to convert all my previously purchased epub files to mobi format so they’ll work on the Kindle. Boo!
Anyway, as I don’t yet have the Kindle in hand since she’s being mean and won’t give it to me early I’m only able to set up and test the conversions with the Kindle apps for the PC and my Android phone.
What I wanted to set up was an easy way to sync all my non-Amazon purchased books between all three devices. Here’s how I’ve done that.
The easiest part was converting the epub files to mobi. Calibre converts pretty much any ebook format to any other ebook format. With that done it was time for the tricky part!
Since these are non-Amazon purchased ebooks I don’t get to use Whispersync. This means I have to sync everything myself.
I already had Dropbox installed on my PC and my phone so that’s what I’ve used to sync between the devices. As the official Dropbox client for Android is a piece of crap I’m using Dropsync.
Assuming you have Calibre, Dropbox on your PC and Dropsync on your Android installed you just need to follow these steps to get everything synced up:
I. Under Preferences -> Saving books to disk in Calibre you want to change your change template to {title} - {authors} That stops Calibre from creating an individual directory for each author or book you’re wanting to sync.
II. Go to your Dropbox folder on your PC and create a directory named kindle
III. Load up the Kindle app on your PC and go to Tools -> Options -> Content and change your content directory to the directory you created in the last step. On my system that path is C:\Users\Chris\Dropbox\kindle
IV. On your phone load Dropsync. Once you have it set up to access your Dropbox account, set it up to sync your local /mnt/sdcard/kindle directory with /kindle on your Dropbox account.
V. Go back to Calibre and select the books you want to sync between the devices. Right click and choose Save to disk -> Save only MOBI format to disk in a single directory. Choose your Dropbox\kindle\ directory.
And viola! You’ve got your non-Amazon ebooks syncing between your devices. Please note since Whispersync is not supported for non-Amazon ebooks you won’t be able to sync what page between the devices.
There Is No Easter Bunny 