Sideloading Kindle books on Galaxy Tab 2

[cknowles63]

I just spent half an hour trying to solve this issue as well.
On the Samsung Galaxy tab, the Kindle folder is hidden by default. So the instructions to drag your books to the Kindle folder are handicapped by the fact that you cannot see said folder.

In your "My Files" app go to settings and select "Show hidden files".

Now you can see the Kindle folder and drag your mobi files into it and the app will find them.

[Amogh Harish]

I've found that the Kindle app for Android is the best out there, hands down. I have two different Android tablets. One is a Galaxy Tab 7". The other is Android running on my laptop. Since I run Ubuntu and Android on the laptop on the same partition, it's quite easy for me to import books on the Kindle app for the laptop. Android-x86 (the name of the project that runs Android on PC) uses the hard disk it's installed on as the sdcard (there is no need for the external sd, since I already have 160 GB on the internal), so all I have to do is mount the partition as root, copy the ebook files to data/media/kindle and when I boot into Android and launch Kindle, I see the book on the homescreen. It's actually very simple.

On the Tab, I connect it to the PC and launch Calibre, which detects the Tab as an Android device and I can use the Send To Device button to send the books I want to read. It imports into sdcard/kindle folder. I'm not sure how it will show up on Windows, because Linux uses mount points to mount USB devices. That is, they appear under /home/media/Galaxy \Tab. Windows uses drive letters, like I:/, which points to the location of the device.

When I tried importing the books into the external sdcard, the tablet couldn't find the files. This is a problem with Kindle for Android app and would encourage you to report it as a bug to Amazon.

Note, this only happens when the internal is mounted as the sd and the sd card is mounted as an external sd. Meaning, it only happens to devices that have Android version 3.0+

[Taken4life]

thanks

[Taken4life]

thanks

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Taken4life

Update:
I wasnt sure how to edit my last post, so here's an update.

Click the "Edit" button at the bottom of your post.

These epub files that you are trying to read on your nook, where are you getting them from, and how?

[Kumabjorn]

The Galaxy Tab 2 doesn't support moving apps to external SD card. Supposedly there are some apps that circumvent this, but they require root. For the time being we are stuck on having our apps, and attached media files in the internal memory. External memory is strictly for video, music and photos. Why Android doesn't include eBooks in that category is beyond me.
There is a rumored Jelly Bean update in the wings, perhaps this will solve the problem?

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by HarryT

OK, I think I'm starting to understand how this works now. My understanding is:

1. Certain types of files can be accessed directly from the SD card. Such files include videos, music, and photographs.

2. For other types of files, it's necessary to copy them to the appropriate app directory in the internal storage in order for them to be seen. This includes Kindle books. In that respect, it's the same as "Kindle for PC", which can only read books which are in the "My Kindle Content" folder.

Can anyone confirm that this is correct?

From what I understand, Samsung devices when booting scan all storages for the usual media files.
You even see some message "scanning for media files" or something like that. (One of the reasons, why I'm not a Samsung fan. On some of my units it takes forever...)
But: They only look for the common files, such as JPEG or MP4. I guess, basically all the files the tablet can process natively.
This does not work for other file formats, such as Kindle books.

Re. SD cards, I highly recommend the app "App2SD". You can do the very same in the Android settings. But then you have to do it for every single app.
Within App2SD, you see all the apps (plus respective content), that can be moved to SD card.
Unfortunately, on Galaxy Note for example this doesn't work.
Instead of "internal storage" and "SD card", there additionally is some nonsense "USB storage". Instead of moving to SD card, it's moving to the USB storage instead, which basically simply is a partition of the internal storage.
I only had this on some Samsung units and on Sony Tablet S. Strange enough, on Sony Tablet P it's working, not so on Sony Tablet S.

There are some relatively complicated hacks to link from one storage type to another one. Theoretically, everything could be moved from internal storage to SD card that way.

[Piper_]

On my Samsung Galaxy Tab 2, I strip and keep all my ebooks on my external SD card, and use Moon+ to read them. Works like a charm, even though it's installed on the internal card.

The Kindle App (not sure about other store apps, like Google Reader & Nook, etc) doesn't have an option to read things stored on the external card, but I prefer to use the more robust Android apps to those, anyway.

[1katie23]

I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 and use multiple ereading apps. I've installed Calibre on my PC and found the Calibre Companion App in the android market. Via settings in CC, you can direct all kindle imported books to a folder in the app that will open in K4A. Easy Peasy.

[pelliguri]

Piper, when you say you strip and keep your ebooks on the external SD card, what do you mean? How do you do that? I've downloaded Moon + to try, but would prefer to store my ebooks on my external drive.

[kwagga]

Tried the following. Crude but it worked.

1. saved the ebook in mobi format on my laptop

2. connected Samsung tablet using USB to laptop. Had already downloaded the Kindle app to Galaxy

3. Went to Computer icon on laptop, and found/opened the Galaxy

4. did a search in the search bar in Galaxy for "Kindle". Laptop found a "Kindle" folder, which I opened. There was one empty folder in Kindle folder - "acw".

5. Pasted the mobi file to the Kindle folder (NOT into acw)

6. Closed the folder on the laptop, opened the Kindle app in the Galaxy, and the new book was there alongside the ones I had purchased from Amazon.com

[PDADoc]

I'm trying out the Kindle app on my Android devices and have one quick question. I've been reading my ebooks using Moon Reader+ Pro in epub format. As an experiment, I converted my entire library to the requisite .mobi format that Kindle seems to use, and I'm all ready to copy them over; just one thing:

I have all my books tagged by category via Calibre (Shakespeare, History, etc.) in different folders; will the Kindle app recognize this structure, or will I have to dump the files all into one directory? I'm really hoping it's the former, as it's just too unwieldy having hundreds of files of different genres in one single directory.

EDIT: Nevermind, I answered my own question by trying it. The answer is no. Whatsmore, while placing the files in that Kindle directory allowed them to be recognized and consequently read, there was no option for sorting the books by tag or subject. Very disappointing, as the actual book reading interface was very good and offered nice options.

Guess I'll stick with Moon Reader for now, or at least until Amazon updates that app a bit more.

[Brianrh]

Originally Posted by kwagga

Tried the following. Crude but it worked.

1. saved the ebook in mobi format on my laptop

2. connected Samsung tablet using USB to laptop. Had already downloaded the Kindle app to Galaxy

3. Went to Computer icon on laptop, and found/opened the Galaxy

4. did a search in the search bar in Galaxy for "Kindle". Laptop found a "Kindle" folder, which I opened. There was one empty folder in Kindle folder - "acw".

5. Pasted the mobi file to the Kindle folder (NOT into acw)

6. Closed the folder on the laptop, opened the Kindle app in the Galaxy, and the new book was there alongside the ones I had purchased from Amazon.com

I tried this kwagga and it worked a treat for getting my converted epubs onto my Galaxy tablet. However are you able to synchronise between the tablet and your PC?

I am running Kindle for PC under Wine in Linux and haven't been able to synchronise between my Galaxy tablet and PC.

Thanks.

Brian

[garytucson]

I know this is an older thread, but I came here earlier looking for an answer to this question and didn't find it here. I have since discovered a solution on my own that others might find useful, so I'm posting this reply for anyone who comes to this site for this same problem, wanting to keep their ebooks on the external SD card and use a reader that won't require them to download each book to the internal memory in order to read them.

Since Honeycomb, almost none of the 'major' names in ereaders (Kindle, Nook,. etc.) will look to the external SD card for anything because google made a stupid decision regarding external storage, which caused developers to quit devloping apps that could be moved to or use external storage, eventhough users loved the convenience of storing as much as possible on ever less expensive SD cards under Gingerbread. If your phone or tablet still has Gingerbread, you can still save all your ebooks, Kindle or otherwise, on the external SD card and Kindle, Nook, etc. will still look for them there and load them from it. But if you use Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich or Jelly Bean, they will not. However, there are a few readers that are overall just as good as Kindle, if not better, that WILL let you store and read almost all of your ebooks from your external SD card, but all of them require a little patience. My favorite is FB Reader because it has the most options with the smallest footprint (read memory requirement). Here's how to make it work in Jelly Bean (this may be similar in HC & ICS but you'll have to play with it on your own as I have only JB):

1 Download and install it for free from the play store
2. Make sure all of your ebooks are in the same folder on your external SD card (it doesn't matter what you name it)
3. Start FB Reader
4. Press 'library' icon (the first of five at the top of the screen that looks like books on a shelf)
5. Press 'file tree' icon (the last of the seven that appear)
6. Press 'device' icon (the one in the middle)
7. Press 'storage' icon (just scroll down and find it)
8. Press 'extSdCard' icon (mine's the top one, your's might not be)
9. Find whatever folder you put all your ebooks in (mine is Kindle, your's is whayever you named it)
10. Choose whichever book you want to read from the list by pressing it
11. Press the 'READ' icon at the top of the screen and viola, you're reading a Kindle (or almost any other ebook format) book from your external SD card without downloading or transferring it to your internal memory.

Hopefully you can make this work for you the way I did and have laid out, step by step. No, it's not as smooth and effortless as it used to be with the Kindle app on my older 7 inch tablet running Gingerbread, but we can thank google for screwing that up for us.

Pleasant reading!!!

[HomeInMyShoes]

I'll also add to this quite old thread and give another solution for sideloading.

I've got a Galaxy S4 and the Kobo reader has an import function which lets you pull in stuff from your device (including the SD-Card.) This worked great for public domain books I had in ePub format. This seemed to work for an ePub I got from MobileRead while Overdrive choked and errored on the file.