Syncing Kindle titles to your Android device
August 10, 2011
I use my Xoom mainly for reading eBooks, and I really like Amazon’s Kindle app.
Unfortunately, it seems to have no support at all for syncing books that are not bought through Amazon (not surprisingly perhaps). This is a problem for me because I often buy from the Pragmatic Programmers, and I don’t want to copy those .mobi files to my tablet manually (I know that PragProg offers to sync the titles via Whispernet, but that only works for physical Kindle devices).
What I found out recently is that there is a pretty easy fix for this:
- Store your books in some folder in your Dropbox, say “/kindle”
- Install the app FolderSync Lite on your Android device
- Set up your Dropbox account in FolderSync. The interface is not very intuitive so pay attention.
- Set up a “folderpair” in FolderSync, mapping /kindle in your Dropbox to /mnt/sdcard/kindle on your device. Make sure the sync type is “to local folder”.
- Schedule this folderpair to sync as often as you like.
You may be wondering if this conflicts with the books you bought through Amazon – after all, they’re also stored in /mnt/sdcard/kindle. The trick is that FolderSync does not take ownership of this folder, it simply copies files from the remote (Dropbox) folder into it. So I assume that it doesn’t even clean up deleted files, although I haven’t tried.
December 21, 2011 at 10:06 pm
Hi,
nice post! I also want to sync my non-amazon ebooks for kindle app with 2 android devices. But is it possible to sync the bookmarks on this way?
December 21, 2011 at 11:50 pm
Thanks 🙂
I don’t think you will be able to sync your bookmarks, unfortunately. But aside from that, the technique I describe can be used for syncing any files to your devices, not just Amazon books.
December 31, 2011 at 11:10 pm
I like your website. I’m currently looking for kindle blog as you have.