Quote:
Originally Posted by DaleDe
You don't need a Kindle to have a Kindle App. They are available for PC, Mac, iOS, Android and are free downloads.
Dale
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Hi DaleDe. The problem was not that of having something Kindle-like with which to read mobi and awz files (I've been using the Android and PC versions of the app for months now), it was that of being able to send such files directly to the device (in my case, the phone) bypassing the send-to-mail step (becase this adds them as personal documents and not books).
For those interested (and reading), I managed to do that eventually. I saw that I could simply copy the files to the directory the Android app uses and then the app detects them as books (not personal documents). With the correct ASIN metadata tag they are also linked to their corresponding Kindle Store page.
So, the next step was trying to see whether what I wanted to achieve was possible.
I copied an already-purchased book (in this case, from Google Books) to the device and I applied some notes/highlights to it. Then I went to its Kindle Store page and I bought it again from Amazon, deleting the book and redownloading it (this, to be sure that I had the Amazon copy on the device and not the custom file anymore). Finally I opened this book to check if my previously applied notes/highlights (which I had added to the Google converted copy) were synced and preserved in this.
I did my tries many times and in many fashions. Without detailing the steps taken here, I think I can state that as a rule notes/highlights are not retained on switching to the Amazon "true" copy, and this for a simple reason (which was already foreseen above): locations aren't the same between the two files, at least in the case I tried (there were slight variations in one of the first chapters and this compromised all subsequent parts of the file).
This apparently was not due to Calibre's conversion process from epub to mobi/awz, but to the two stores (Google and Amazon) delivering two different copies for the same ebook (perhaps from two different updates by the publisher).
For some other books locations might indeed match, but I think this is too unreliable a base to start doing what I wanted to do in the first place, i.e. consolidating all my favorite books in the Kindle cloud by purchasing them again on Amazon whenever a discount pops up, meanwhile uploading my Google Books files. (Ultimately, I wanted to this because I like the Kindle app and Kindle synchronization more than other e-readers.)
It's a pity actually, because I found that the files where notes/highlights/last position are stored for each book (which on Windows have the mbp extension) are written in a very readable (and parsable) format.
Many of the tries I did involved copying the relevant sections of such files to the new ones. Doing thus I did succeed in passing the previously-made notes and highlights to the book purchased in Amazon, but - as I said - the highlights' locations translated to different parts of the book compared with the other copy, and this because of differences in location values between the two ebooks.
There's certainly room for plugins here (or software in general), something that would update the old location values to the new ones (taking raw text of the highlights/notes as a reference).
But I admit that my use case appear to be too much of a niche one to be of interest to anyone.