Quote:
Originally Posted by slm
I think that Amazon supplies a copy of the book from the Amazon archive. The Amazon archive is just the books you've bought from Amazon--the same list you can see on the "Manage your Kindle" screen. I would bet that no electronic copy of the book is stored in your "archive" at all-just the information Amazon needs to access the file and add the right PID when it send the file to a device.
If all of these assumptions are true, there is no way to add external files to the archive.
You can, however, "publish" your ebook at Amazon using their self publishing tools, price it at zero and buy it. I'll bet that book will sync!!!
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Bingo!!!
This makes a lot of sense to me.
The device says to a server "here is the last page read for (some hacked) book identified by number xyz", the server says "never heard of you".
I suppose you could masquerade some content to synch by transplanting a perfectly valid, purchased from Amazon, header onto that content, but that just hurts my head.
I like the publishing idea. Clever. Too bad it might not be a good idea for that "backup copy" of some book that I made for personal reasons.
To the "it costs Amazon" and "let's pay a subscription" ideas:
I suggest it wouldn't cost Amazon very much at all at the margin (extra) to let users synch up to a "small number" of personal, non Amazon purchased, ebooks.
In fact, if since sync is "on" by default (I think it is), then Amazon is most likely incurring much more relative extra "cost" than it needs to, relative to how many people actually use the feature. I would also guess Amazon is spending much more than it would if it gave users a "per book" (Amazon e-book or not) choice. In other words, by implementing this feature with more user control, Amazon could save $ and expand the feature to non Amazon content- a "win win" all around. (of course if they wanted to be greedy and charge for it, that's their prerogative - i.e. to induce you to buy Amazon content)
[Frankly, though, given EC2's daily throughput and S3 capacity, WhisperSync or even WhisperSync times 10 is probably rounding error. Likewise for WAN charges given all the other data flowing back and forth over Sprint's network. (OK - maybe only times 2) The "cost" premise may be specious]