Quote:
Originally Posted by jswinden
I agree that we should complain. I suspect it will do absolutely no good though. Amazon makes all of its revenue from the K4PC, K4Mac, K4Android, and K4iOS apps by selling books to read on them. The apps are free. If we don't buy Amazon books for these apps, then they don't make money. Therefore they have no monetary interest in enabling these apps to have the same feature set for non-Amazon books as they do for Amazon books. From a business stand point it makes sense to provide far fewer features for non-Amazon books. From our stand point it sucks.
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I'm a former Kindle owner and I've written to Amazon to complain about this issue before - unable to sync highlights/bookmarks/notes or reading position to my laptop, for non-Amazon books - and posted several times in their forums. And you're right, it did absolutely no good.
From a business standpoint, I'd say there is a monetary interest in thinking of your customers as people who are happy to pay for a great product that works well, rather than selling them crippleware because you assume they're all criminals and pirates.
Amazon would certainly profit from me if I could sync highlights etc., on books I bought elsewhere, to my laptop, because then I'd buy a new Kindle, and doubtless more books from Amazon. As it is, I'm saving up for an iPad instead, because Apple gets it, and Amazon (and everyone else) still doesn't. I might buy a book from Amazon once in a while if they have a good price, but then you have to know how to unlock it and convert mobi to epub and so on, so if it's only an extra dollar or something I'll probably end up buying it somewhere else.
I really would prefer a Kindle, because I like the e-ink screen for reading. I even tried out JFHey's suggestion to install the Android emulator with Kindle app, to sync my Personal Documents on my laptop. (I put a little guide about how I did it here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...9&postcount=42 )
It's amazing that it actually works at all, and weird to have a virtual Samsung tablet on my Mac. Unfortunately it's klunky and the text doesn't render well, so it's a bit irritating to read. But the main thing is that you can't copy/paste text from it. For most people that's not a problem I guess, but I do some studying and writing on my laptop, and if I can't easily grab a quote from a book I'm writing about, it's a pain. Of course the Kindle for Mac app is the same (if you're not an American), copy/pasting is disabled. I've found some guides with long explanations of how to make highlights and then go to the Amazon website and download them, but it's just stupidly convoluted. In iBooks, it's just: "1. Select text. 2. Press copy" - whether on Mac or iOS. And all your highlights, notes, and bookmarks sync to all your devices, even for non-Apple books, and even if you're not American :-)