[gman99]

>>it doesn't acknowledge anything not bought through Amazon as "books"

I have a Kindle and this is patently not true. I have multiple DRM-free .mobi "books" that I have sideloaded. You don't even need a cable; just add the book as an attachment and email it direct to your kindle ([e-mail]) and it gets synced over WiFi.

[bowlofpetunias]

And Kindle doesn't acknowledge them as "books" but as "docs". Subsequently they are also ignored by the Kindle app.

At least the Apple iTunes ecosystem acknowledges my mp3's as music and generally as first class citizens for everything but iCloud.

What Amazon does is childish and annoying.

Calibre can't properly integrate with Amazon's proprietary ecosystem, so you're stuck with 2 separate ways of managing your books, and a are pretty much encouraged to rip out the DRM. (Okay, so I would have done the latter anyway without the encouragement.)

And then you still have a reader that says "na na na na na, those aren't really books!"

Pathetic.

Nice reader though.

[gcb0]

this only works for a few formats and small files.

wife bought a kindleDX to replace the mountain of books and huge withe papwr pdfs she have to read.

kindle will refuse pretty much all files for one reason or another. and none of the books are available in the amazon walled garden.

unfortunatelly we missed the return date. worst misleading purchase ever.

kindles are only good for people reading novels.

[cpleppert]

I have a kindle DX and this is false. PDFs are relatively easy to read in the landscape orientation and dont require any conversion whatsoever. If you can convert any ebook format to mobi you are good to go. Try calibre for starters.

[prezjordan]

Student here. I used my Kindle DX for everything from textbooks to sheet music. My Kindle never rejected anything. I often converted epub books to mobi and simply emailed them to myself.

[officemonkey]

Calibre allows you to trivially create a local wifi-accessible server to side-load your ebooks and pdfs from other sources.

[wink]

I'm reading papers and random PDFs from the internet without problems on my non-paperwhite kindle.