Sideloaded Whispersync to Kindle Keyboard and Kindle for Android

[purgatorios]

Hey all, thanks to everyone contributing on this site (and especially Kovid Goyal) for enabling this awesome ebook world. Love it!

I'm writing to ask for help getting page syncing set up between my Kindle and my Android phone. Here's some info:

Hardware:

Kindle 3 Keyboard WiFi/3G (w/ads) stock

Samsung Galaxy s2 i777 (AT&T version) running Jelly Bam ROM Android 4.2.1

PC running Windows 8 (specs available if helpful)

Software:

Calibre 0.9.16 [64 bit]

Kindle app (most recent version) on the Phone

What I've Tried

• testing Whispersync with a book purchased from Amazon
• Changing Calibre preferences for Mobi output to set type to [EBOK]
• Adding a DRM-free .mobi file to Calibre, downloading metadata and converting to .mobi
• sideloading via USB to both Kindle directory on phone and Kindle3 library
• doing the above with the .mobi type set to "new" instead of "old"
• doing the above with 3 different files

Results

Whispersync worked for the book purchased from Amazon, which I had redownloaded from the archive.

The .mobi files (all three different ones) were legible on both devices in "old" format, in "new" format the K3 couldn't open it.

Among the "old" files they could query Amazon's database (i.e. I hit sync and they would display "retrieving furthest page" without an error) but neither would detect a further page read, despite there being an advanced position on the other device that had been synced to Amazon's servers.

Hypothesis and Questions

It seems to me that despite them originating from the same file, that once they get to each device Amazon creates separate sync profiles for each one. Since from what I've read, if it's set to EBOK this should be indexed by the ASIN written into the .mobi file, which Calibre generates when switching the type to EBOK, there may be something wrong with my preferences, or Amazon has changed something about the way they do things that is evading the Calibre configs meant to address this. Or I just messed something up!

Q: What did I do wrong?

Q: If this is not fixable, should I try emailing .mobi files to both through amazon's email address? Or upload to the archive and download from there?

Q: If whispersync doesn't work, is there a guide somewhere for getting Calibre to sync furthest read location between devices? Does this involve "send annotation?

Apologies if this information exists somewhere, I did a lot of searching but you know how it goes. Thanks very much for any help!

[kovidgoyal]

whispersync only works for files registered in amazons database. That means files purchased from them or delivered wirelessly from their whispersync database. So email your books.

[purgatorios]

Thanks KG, will try that way and report back.