Using with iPhone

Sorry if this has already been asked, but..

Just an iPhone and added the Kindle app. I have a document i want to read on both the iPhone and Kindle and thus sync. My question is, how do i get the document onto the iPhone? I have tried sending it to the free address but that just delivers it to the Kindle. I can't figure a way to just drag and drop it anyway either.

Anyone have any ideas?

Does 'manage my kindle' give you the option of delivering docs to your iphone? - alternatively the iphone can get e-mails, I've got mine synced with my registered amazon account and when I send my documents to free.kindle.com they get sent to the Kindle and the registered e-mail address which them shows up on the iphone - I haven't figured how to transfer them from iphone e-mail to kindle app yet!

If the iPhone app is like the Android one you'd do menu > archived items >select book

I have the Kindle app on the iPhone. Just went into it for the first time in ages and when the app started up it did a sync automatically (there is a button to force a sync if it doesn't do one). The "Archived Items" section then showed all but one of the books I've bought for the Kindle - the one not shown there is one I'd already downloaded and read so it's shown in the main list because it's not archived on the iPhone. I hadn't downloaded any of the others, which is why they *were* still archived. I tapped one of them, and it immediately showed it as downloading, 5 seconds later it reached 100% and moved into the main list. I tapped on it there and it opened at the same location I was reading in it when I last synced the Kindle. So everything seems to work pretty much exactly as I'd expect it to. So:

* Do a sync in the iPhone Kindle app.
* Your books should appear in the "Archived Items" section, so just tap one of them to download it.
* Once the download finishes the book moves into the main list and you can tap it to start reading.

If you don't see any archived items after syncing, I'd guess the app's not registered to the same account as your Kindle. In that case, tap the "i" button at bottom right on the app's Home screen and the first item tells you what account it's registered to. If I tap the ">" button to expand that item I get a "Deregister" button, but if yours isn't registered I'd guess you'll get a "Register" button instead so register it. Or if it's registered to the wrong account, deregister then register to the right one. Now sync again, and hopefully your books should then appear in the "Archived Items" section.

Still think I'll be sticking to reading on the Kindle except in emergencies though, as that iPhone screen ain't good for reading books!

Thanks for the help guys.

Still no luck, so i have phoned CS and been advised that you cannot add PDFs or their conversions to the iPhone. You can only add books purchased from Amazon.

Seems a bit crap like.

If it's just PDFs you want to read, get a copy of the "Files Lite" iPhone app. That lets you copy files to the iPhone, and includes a PDF viewer so you can view your PDFs once you get them there. Works in portrait or landscape mode, pinch to zoom in/out, retains pretty much all of the original formatting and I've not yet had any problems viewing any of the PDFs I've tried. I don't know whether Files lite does any conversion on the files as you copy them, but if it does it's done in the background so you don't need to do any preparation. I have technical manuals for various gadgets plus motorbike/car service and repair manuals etc on my iphone, very handy if you have a problem in the middle of nowhere and much lighter than carrying the books.

The app does need to connect to a parent app on your PC to copy the files, so I don't know if you could get it to work when you're not at home (you might if you can arrange for the app to be visible remotely, e.g. by using a VPN connection so you can get to it over the Internet). You only need that connection while actually copying files though, once they're on the iPhone you can read them anywhere without any kind of connection.

Perhaps this isn't an ideal solution for you as it might mean having to copy each PDF to the Kindle and iPhone in two separate ways as you can't email to Files Lite AFAIK, but it is a workable solution and to be honest I find PDFs easier to read on the iPhone than the Kindle despite the smaller screen as you can zoom in and move around the page so much more quickly (and it's in colour). Wouldn't be as good as the Kindle for long periods of reading text of course, but ideal for a quick look at something technical.

"you cannot add PDFs or their conversions to the iPhone"
Not quite right, you can of course read PDFs (Or many other formats) on the iPhone, just not via the Amazon Kindle app, which unsurprisingly is for reading Kindle-formatted books.

The Kindle is also not designed to sync PDFs between different devices, just Kindle formatted books. One reason for this is that there is no telling whats inside a PDF.
A PDF document might look like it contains letters and words, and it might, but it might also be nothing but a scan of a books pages, in effect pictures of words and letters. Not the same thing at all to a computer.

"A PDF document might look like it contains letters and words, and it might, but it might also be nothing but a scan of a books pages, in effect pictures of words and letters. Not the same thing at all to a computer."

True, and it might also be a combination of scanned images, text, drawing instructions, embedded font definitions, etc. These are indeed not the same thing to a computer, but any or all of them could appear in a perfectly valid PDF - e.g. the PDF file format does not disallow using scanned images to represent the pages if you want. So I'm not sure why any valid PDF couldn't be copied to a Kindle, regardless of whether it contains text or scanned pages. I have some image-heavy PDFs which display fine on the Kindle - I haven't checked to see whether any of the pages contain nothing but an image, but some certainly have a full-page background image and that comes out ok, so I can't see why a lack of text in front of that would cause a problem. I know some PDFs don't display well on the Kindle without reformatting or actually cause errors/crashes, but I haven't seen a suggestion that this is specifically to do with whether they contain text or just images. In any case, you can get PDFs onto the Kindle yourself which do crash it, so it would be a bit OTT to prevent syncing of PDFs from other devices just in case one causes a problem.

I suspect that the main reason it doesn't sync your own PDFs between different devices is because the syncing is done through Amazon's servers and your PDFs aren't up there, so it would involve them being uploaded to the servers from one device then downloaded to the other device when it next synced. Apart from increased network traffic this would also mean that Amazon would be covering the cost of storing however many personal documents you wanted to have available, which could be huge considering you might choose to have 1,000 PDFs archived in case you wanted to download one (and PDFs are likely to be much larger files than a Kindle book).

So I'd guess that you're right it's just Kindle books you purchased that will get synced between devices, but it's because that doesn't pose Amazon any problems as they only need to store one copy of each of those books no matter how many people have it archived (and they already have that copy anyway to sell to new purchasers).