[jddunn]

Hello all. I've been reading here since I got my Fire last Dec., trying to get an idea of how things work on this platform and figure out how to set things up for the long haul.

If I'm going to use this as my main reading device, I need to get some stuff resolved and get a workflow in place for adding, archiving, and managing books, and especially for dealing with annotations and highlights.

I want to be able to use a mix of Amazon-purchased and sideloaded public domain books, as seamlessly as I can. From what I can tell, that rules out Whispernet and the Cloud Drive, which is pretty much fine with me. It'd be nice, and I thought about messing around with metadata hacks to fool Whispernet and such, but it looked inconsistent and like just too much trouble in the long run.

So, the answer is Calibre, right? Manage and archive my library with that, convert any new Amazon books that I purchase to the same format as my sideloaded books (probably Mobi?), and go onward from there.

But, what about the annotations and highlights and such? Is there a way to reliably manage those, export and import them so they aren't tied to this device forever, make sure they stay linked to the appropriate locations in the book file, and so on? I found the experimental "fetch annotations" feature in Calibre, but it's not working for me in tests with existing annotated mobi books, and even if I get it working, it's not clear from the documentation whether it keeps the annotations tied to the appropriate place in the book file, or whether it just spits them out in plain text and appends them to the file as a comment.

I'm currently in grad school and have to read a lot of PDFs for classes, and I've been able to get this sort of workflow working with those through a combination of RepliGo Reader and Dropbox. I keep the PDFs in my Dropbox folder, download them to the Kindle when I'm ready to read them, make highlights and notes in RepliGo, save, and Dropbox syncs the changes back to my PC. But, PDF's are self-contained, so that's probably a simpler nut to crack.

Is there a more general reader program like Mantano that does this kind of thing with ebooks? That, or are there hacks in the pipeline to make the Amazon reader work with things like Dropbox, or handle annotations and highlights consistently and make them exportable?

I read something about how the people initially rooting the Fire saw a lot of potential for extending the Amazon reader, but I haven't found any concrete followup on that so far. If that stuff is coming, I'd really rather stick with the Amazon reader because I like the interface and the added things like the dictionary and Wikipedia lookup, but I'm willing to look elsewhere if I have to.

Any tips on how to get this all working in a sustainable and consistent way that's not going to give me lots of headaches from managing sideloaded files separately from Amazon content, or trap all of my stuff on the same device or platform forever?