Hi, I am planning to buy a Kindle e-reader in this discount season.

However, a few questions, kindly help.

1) Can we upload other (not bought from Amazon) mobi files in our Kindle (from Calibre right).
2) If we can upload, does it gets synchronized (highlights & notes as well) on PC, Kindle & other devices)
3) Lets say I wanna search for some text within the whole lot of books that I have on my Kindle. Is this possible.
4) Last (if above is yes), Does the above search shows results from the uploaded mobi files as well.

Thanks a lot

Today is the last day for discount, please if someone can help.

I owned a kindle a while ago.

1: yes, with Calibre, but not necessary, can also drag and drop.
2: Amazon Whispersync service does this, but it works only for books purchased directly from Amazon.
3: I know for sure you can search within one book, but I don't think it searches all books.
4: ??

My two cents: I highly recommend an ebook with a built-in backlight. Don't rely on an exterior light or a case light, believe me, your eyes will thank you for it.

Thanks Marlap - 20wrz awarded fro helping and recommending !!

Anyone who can help me on 3 and 4 please.

I no longer have a Kindle since mine broke and I started using my phone, but based on memory (and it also might depend on model):

On 3: I'm pretty sure you can't. There are other options: it is on the to-do list for Calibre, but until then there is a Recoll plug-in, but only for Linux, and Quality Check, but that will only search inside ePub text; DocFetcher could be used to search your Calibre library folder; you could, I suppose, convert everything to .txt and then you can use your OS' internal search engine will index it (but that seems like an awkward step - you might as well convert to ePub). None of that is as convenient as being able to do it in Kindle or Calibre across all your ebooks, however, as I try and have ePubs of everything Quality Check works well enough for me, but there are 1,500 books (out of around 10,000) not being searched (although this will include image PDFs, which nothing will index) and if I really needed to find the right book, I'd give DocFetcher a go - in fact I might have a play comparing the two. One obvious difference is speed - DocFetcher creates and index which takes time but then gives quick results, while Quality Check seems to just searches straight off which is slow if you have a few books. I assume it is the indexing issue which makes a full text search in Calibre tricky.

On 4: You might need to clarify - do you mean does it show snippets of text that match your results, so you can see it in context? Like searching in a book on Amazon? If so, then if the answer to 3 is definitely no then so will this one. You might want to check the alternatives and see if anything suits - Quality Check does do this in the log it generates and also filters the books to those that get hits, which is pretty much exactly what I want just with a Calibre search, I'd just like it to cover more formats and create an index for quicker searching.

Basically, as long as you don't have qualms about giving Amazon your money (I'm thinking of going for a Nook) then you should go for it - it might not tick every box of your wishlist, but then again I am unsure anything will and there are ways to work around it. The big pluses are convenience, great battery life and excellent reading experience, which are all issues you'll rely on every day, as opposed to the occasional full text search

Thanks Carcosa, the added calibre response was excellent.

20WRZ awarded for the knowledge share.

No problem. and thanks for the WRZ.

One other thing about Quality Check (beyond its general usefulness that I forgot to mention - the search is really just a small addition to the main work it does) is that you can also apply filters and then select the filtered list. You can then change "Search scope" to selections. That means you can search only horror novels or those from a specific author or only those you added this year. All very handy if you are looking for something specific and you can narrow it down a bit.

Also if anyone wants to bring up a list of books you don't have ePubs for so you can do a quick conversion, then use this in your search box:

Code: Select allnot formats:"=EPUB"

And if you want to find the ebooks where you have .mobi files but not .epub (so you know what to convert):

not formats:"=EPUB" and formats:"=MOBI"

The beauty of this is you can also use Calibre to convert things like text PDFs to ePub (any image PDFs or CBR archives of page scans are not indexable because there is no actual text) - I am no fan of the results it gives (and have other better ways of converting them), but if you are only after the text so you can search it (and you are never going to read the conversion), it is fine.

I no longer have a Kindle since mine broke and I started using my phone, but based on memory (and it also might depend on model):

On 3: I'm pretty sure you can't. There are other options: it is on the to-do list for Calibre, but until then there is a Recoll plug-in, but only for Linux, and Quality Check, but that will only search inside ePub text; DocFetcher could be used to search your Calibre library folder; you could, I suppose, convert everything to .txt and then you can use your OS' internal search engine will index it (but that seems like an awkward step - you might as well convert to ePub). None of that is as convenient as being able to do it in Kindle or Calibre across all your ebooks, however, as I try and have ePubs of everything Quality Check works well enough for me, but there are 1,500 books (out of around 10,000) not being searched (although this will include image PDFs, which nothing will index) and if I really needed to find the right book, I'd give DocFetcher a go - in fact I might have a play comparing the two. One obvious difference is speed - DocFetcher creates and index which takes time but then gives quick results, while Quality Check seems to just searches straight off which is slow if you have a few books. I assume it is the indexing issue which makes a full text search in Calibre tricky.

On 4: You might need to clarify - do you mean does it show snippets of text that match your results, so you can see it in context? Like searching in a book on Amazon? If so, then if the answer to 3 is definitely no then so will this one. You might want to check the alternatives and see if anything suits - Quality Check does do this in the log it generates and also filters the books to those that get hits, which is pretty much exactly what I want just with a Calibre search, I'd just like it to cover more formats and create an index for quicker searching.

Basically, as long as you don't have qualms about giving Amazon your money (I'm thinking of going for a Nook) then you should go for it - it might not tick every box of your wishlist, but then again I am unsure anything will and there are ways to work around it. The big pluses are convenience, great battery life and excellent reading experience, which are all issues you'll rely on every day, as opposed to the occasional full text search

Recoll is now available for Windows as well. Hopefully someone will take the time to develop a plugin for Calibre for Windows. Also AstroGrep works fine for searching text. Its a standalone program and it integrates into the folder context menu. Works great with ePUB. MOBI is a bit more finicky. Some work great, in others the text is garbled. AZW mostly yields unusable results.