Troubleshooting Kindle DX and Dropbox

[harryE123]

whatever the case might be it's ludicrous how they haven't enabled this yet, I would pay the extra monthly fee.

How they f. do they expect in our day and age someone with 3gb to be able to store all their content? This is clearly a marketing choice to choke any reading other than amazon content. There is no rational for no sd slot and no webservers/cloud support for downloads. The ipad doesn't have an sd slot, but they have min. 16gb space and cloud support everywhere. The sony's don't have (as far as I know and I could be wrong) cloud support be they have sd card slots.

Wtf is wrong with amazon? Why can't these guys get their s. together and start offering a worthwhile device instead of trying to strangle innovation to sell more?

[avlad]

3GB is more than enough to store ebooks. Kindle is an ebook reader and not a multimedia device like ipad.

[harryE123]

rubbish, pdf files are not multimedia, they are books or journal articles and as an ebook reader the kindle should have space for them, or at least interface with the cloud. 3gb is pathetic as they can barely hold a few pdfs. It's even not good enough for a decent sized ebook library. The sony is not a multimedia device either yet it allows for sd cards. It and a number of other devices on the market. You argument does not stand under any perspective. The only reason amazon are doing this is to forbid any content other than theirs. Which is a shameful tactic.

[avlad]

" 3gb is pathetic as they can barely hold a few pdfs. It's even not good enough for a decent sized ebook library. "

be serious. How long do you need/want to keep pdfs on the ereader, forever?
Also, amazon allows to import other types of documents on their devices.

[sbl]

One possibility to transfer pdf in dropbox to kindle without computer is using ipad. It is not extremely convenient but works. Following is my configuration:

ipad with dropbox: This app will let you download file from dropbox to its ipad app.

ipad->camera kit->usb hub powered by external power adapter->kindle.

iFile after jb ipad: Open pdf in dropbox using iFile and then copy pdf to kindle.

[p010ne]

You may want to try wordcycler?
Don't know if readitlater is supported?

[harryE123]

Originally Posted by avlad

" 3gb is pathetic as they can barely hold a few pdfs. It's even not good enough for a decent sized ebook library. "

be serious. How long do you need/want to keep pdfs on the ereader, forever?
Also, amazon allows to import other types of documents on their devices.

Are you kidding me? I am talking about tens (hundreds) of gbs or reference libraries, journal articles, tons of saved content from the web, and I have to squeeze everything in 3gb? And sure I want to keep as much as I can there, I don't want to spend the rest of my life moving things in and out of the device. Do you keep taking books on and off your shelves? Crap mobile phones that sell for $50 have more storage nowadays.

Originally Posted by p010ne

You may want to try wordcycler?
Don't know if readitlater is supported?

Thanks for the heads up! I will try ephemera for mac, because I am a mac user.

[EricLandes]

Originally Posted by harryE123

Are you kidding me? I am talking about tens (hundreds) of gbs or reference libraries, journal articles, tons of saved content from the web, and I have to squeeze everything in 3gb? And sure I want to keep as much as I can there, I don't want to spend the rest of my life moving things in and out of the device. Do you keep taking books on and off your shelves? Crap mobile phones that sell for $50 have more storage nowadays.

There's already complaints that the DX is too expensive, even after the latest price drop. Overbuilding the device to meet your specifications would cause the device to be more expensive than necessary.

Amazon is one of the best companies out there at understanding their customer base. And I'm sure the DX capabilities are designed to handle the overwhelming majority of that customer base.

It's bad business to overbuild a product to meet the possible requirements of 0.5% (or, likely, a significantly smaller percentage) of your prospective customers. And, from your description of your content, a customer that doesn't buy any books at Amazon.

[harryE123]

Sure they are the best company to understand their customer that's why they've never actually released any sales numbers for the kindles... They are trying to force their customer base into making them more money with no concern for their real needs. Had they really taken care of what they might actually want they would have dominated the area, but they haven't. The ipad came along (a different but overlapping class of device) and kicked their behind in a few weeks.

Just let it go guys, you are in the wrong here if you try supporting the opposing view, these are not arguments to say adding 16gb instead of 3gb even as an option would be overbuilding. That is ridiculous with todays prices in flash, that would cost max $20 more.

And tell me how much would an sd card slot augment the cost? $1 dollar? At most.

As for my description of content being in your opinion one that "doesn't buy any books at Amazon" is again absolutely baseless.
If they provided a device that could cater well to my e-reading needs then I would buy their content too happily since I would be doing most my e-reading in that device. But to buy a device solely for their content and have them make it extra hard to use my content? They must be nuts. That's what sony tried to do with alac and the digital walkman, the first ones of which actually converted mp3 to alac, and look where they ended up, from being the number one mobile music device vendor to being completely irrelevant.

I am demanding two things from amazon: A storage option (sd card, not ridiculously low memory, dropbox interface, or any combination of these) and secondly of course that they offer combined discount prices for ebooks and print books (I am simply not willing to buy the same content twice for the privilege of being able to to read a book occasionally on the go). Had they not been shortsighted and greedy they could have arranged a heavily discounted kindle price with the print book (which would come close to the actual price of developing an ebook along with a print book) and a device with decent storage options. I would then be there number one customer as I have been with print books. Instead they are intentionally crippling their device so I can solely use it for purchases from their store and they make me pay twice for having a print copy too. Too bad they don't want my money.

Apple on the other hand pushed for drm free music a long time ago, drastically cut digital music prices and enabled their devices to seamlessly play content from any source (and apple damn well knew that 95% of the content on the ipods was not purchased via them) that's why they sold millions of ipods, iphones, and ipads. Because as Steve knows very well one should aim for volume.

Too bad amazon has their heads stuck up too far up some orifice to understand that.

[katzenstreik]

To come back to the topic there are nice ways to get the content of your dropbox library to your kindle.

If you use calibre to organize your library you can use calibre2opds which builds a nice html interface accessible through the browser on your kindle.

If you don't use calibre, there is a script called pyndexer which indexes your library and provides you access through an ordinary html index. This is the thread on how to set this tool up.

To answer the original question: unfortunately the Kindle doesn't let you download PDF, MP3 etc. It's clearly done to minimizing the data volume. The Kindle User's Guide states the only formats you can download through your browser:

The types of files you can download include Kindle content (.AZW, .AZW1), unprotected Mobipocket books (.MOBI, .PRC), and text files (.TXT)

[nerys]

here is the primary issue. Amazon wanted the whispernet. The neat thing about whispernet is that its FREE to the end user. Your not even SUPPOSED to be able to use the internet. that whispernet is for AMAZON to deliver the content to YOU wirelessly. so how dare you complain about something your not even paying for. :-) (trying to add some humor here)

if it gets abused sprint or at&t won't be too happy they are getting almost NOTHING from amazon compared to what they WOULD be getting from you if you purchased a normally priced data plan.

part of why this works is its simplicity. add complexity and the system breaks down. (I think this is why they won't add a PAY option its too complex to manage via both amazon and the cellular provider.)

For now I am exstatic that I can download a few free books here and there google search wikipedia and my gmail and pay absolutely NOTHING for it for nearly nationwide coverage. thats pretty damned hard to beat and pretty damned hard to complain about :-)

I would never download a NORMAL pdf (ie magazine) for fear of abusing that connection.

NOW with apps coming you might have some options. Think you download a txt file and your "app" renames all those txt files to PDF. Bam now you got your PDF's

but again use too much bandwidth and WE ALL LOSE as at this point it will be easier to shut out ALL web access all together and restrict it to amazon purchases than it would be to set up any kind of pay scheme.

I say enjoy the FREE 3g nationwide internet and don't abuse it and whine about its limitations.

[pilotbob]

OK,

I haven't tried this yet....

But my thought is...

1. Put all your ebooks on Dropbox.

2. create a script that crawls your ebook folders, gets all the info and builds a .mobi ebook and puts it into drop box.

3. On kindle go to your browser and input the URL for the .prc that is a list of all your ebooks. That will download it. Then you can browse through the file, also search and it will have D/l links for each file in drop box.

This is very similar to what feedbooks and MR do. You could probably even get some Calibre action going and use it's database so that the index book you create has summaries etc in it.

Perhaps someday when I am bored I will give it a whack.

BOb

[nerys]

will a "link" in a PRC activate and initiate a web connection? ie can the two pieces of software (the reader interface and the web browser) talk to each other? ie will the link in the PRC "invoke" the web browser and send it to the specified url?

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by nerys

will a "link" in a PRC activate and initiate a web connection? ie can the two pieces of software (the reader interface and the web browser) talk to each other? ie will the link in the PRC "invoke" the web browser and send it to the specified url?

I don't know about opening the browser, but it can have links to initiate the download of a mobi/prc file...

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25268
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17465

[nerys]

now THAT is pretty darned cool.

just tried it. the download links in the kindleguide invoke the browser and it downloads the book.

VERY cool :-)