Syncing Kindle titles to your Android device

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:

1. Store your books in some folder in your Dropbox, say “/kindle”
2. Install the app FolderSync Lite on your Android device
3. Set up your Dropbox account in FolderSync. The interface is not very intuitive so pay attention.
4. 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”.
5. Schedule this folderpair to sync as often as you like.

If you got the options in FolderSync right, you can now put your non-Amazon purchases into /kindle in your Dropbox and they will automatically appear in the Kindle app on your Android device.

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.

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