7 Answers2025-08-11
Hi, Just like you, I have a requirement that must be met: no matter which device I use to read, my reading progress can be recorded automatically, and I won't have to trouble myself to flip back to the page I stopped at when I switch devices. I know Kobo has a mobile app, but can it implement functions like cross-device reading progress sync, just like the Kindle app? Did you ever get an answer to the question you asked earlier?
3 Answers2025-07-15
As a student, I interact daily with numerous PDF files on my tablet, phone, and laptop. Simplest PDF Reader from Google is my default PDF reader because it is so simple. Unfortunately, there is no progress syncing between devices, so I have to resort to Bookmarking individual pages or even taking screenshots of the PDF where I left off. Xodo or Foxit Reader have excellent progress syncing via their cloud services, but I am just a Google guy at heart.
Oddly, PDFs that are opened via Google Drive (in the web interface) do appear to remember where one left off. But that does not translate to the mobile app, apparently a separate program with no sharing of state. I suspect here that Google is missing an opportunity to “get PDF reading right” in a manner consistent with their other syncing data in the air and on various devices. Workarounds will do for now, but I hope that proper syncing of PDFs across devices is something they’ll implement in the near future. For casual readers, Google PDF Reader is fine. But for serious readers of PDFs who wish to read them on multiple devices, it’s not worth it.
10 Answers2025-09-02
My little trick for reading on both devices is to always stop at the end of a chapter. For some reason the two devices seem to sync better up to a chapter end than to any arbitrary page number. Thus if I finish reading a chapter on my phone, I know that when I pick up my tablet to continue reading, I will start on the correct page for the start of the next chapter. However, if I stop reading in the middle of a chapter on my phone, then there is a 50/50 chance that I will pick up reading on the correct page on my tablet. This is just one of the little idiosyncrasies that I have grown to live with.
5 Answers2025-07-21
I’m using the content server from Calibre with the free ebook reader Cool Reader. While not exactly syncing ebooks for free like the official apps of Barnes & Noble, Kobo and others do, it’s working great for me so far. Other indie ebook reader apps for Android, like ReadEra, seem to require manual backups of added ebooks, though. But for the tech-savvy type, running your own personal Calibre server to sync your whole library of books, including sideloaded ones, is certainly possible.
6 Answers2025-08-05
I have my ebook collection managed in much the same way I managed my music collection during the iPod era: as a central hub with manual transfers between the hub and other locations. So my ebook collection is managed by Calibre on my desktop. I sync my Kobo by plugging it in and transferring books. I sync a handful of books to my phone by saving a disk copy of them in Calibre and then copying the saved books to a Dropbox folder on my phone. Any edits made to books on one device do not get propagated to other devices. This approach has the big advantage of not causing any headaches, and no chance of ebook collection corruption. It also means that Calibre runs very fast on my desktop, because the hub for my ebook collection is on a local SSD. The only ‘cost’ is some manual work, which I find easy to manage for a collection of less than 10,000 books.
9 Answers2025-08-04
I think this feature is meant for passive tracking of books, i.e. Goodreads doesn’t broadcast a public update every time you read a page. Instead, it updates the progress percentage for the book you’re currently reading on your Goodreads ‘currently reading’ shelf. It’s a quiet, background sync feature for your personal tracking needs on Goodreads, not a feature to add to a newsfeed of updates from your friends.
9 Answers2025-07-07
Note that if you chose to “Sign in with Apple” and enabled “Hide My Email” for that account, Apple generates a random e-mail address for you to sign up with new services. Note that Apple uses the same Apple ID for all your Apple devices, so if you Sign in with Apple on your iPhone with the “Hide My Email” option enabled, you cannot sign up for new services with the same account using your Android and Signing up directly with the e-mail address that was generated for you instead of using “Sign in with Apple”. The randomly generated e-mail address is actually your technical account identifier. Therefore, it is recommended to use the same method to sign up for new services on all your devices in order to add them to your sync universe.
10 Answers2026-07-27
Shared reading experiences for a fandom. I am part of a book club and we read books on our Kindles and use a private Goodreads group for our shared reading experience. We can add notes and highlights to our eBooks and if enabled, other club members can see the most popular parts of the book as well as their friends’ highlights. All highlights are synced to the members’ devices whether they added them on their e-reader or laptop. Thus, my highlighted quotes are synced and I can access them when I write my discussion post for the book club. Shared reading becomes a little less solitary thanks to this technology.
5 Answers2025-07-08
Make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into before you sync your Kindle to Goodreads, because by enabling this feature you’ll be sharing your reading progress (and, thus, your reading habits and how fast you read) with Amazon’s social platform. This means that, in addition to being able to see your own progress, your friends list will be able to see when you’re reading a certain book. Goodreads has a lot of privacy settings for things like this, but they can be very granular and sort of confusing. So, my take is that, if you do end up enabling this, you should go into your Goodreads privacy settings and see who can see your updates. If you’re not really into the social part of Goodreads, you might even want to set your reading activity to “Only Me”. The convenience of having your Kindle update your Goodreads account automatically is not worth sharing every single page turn with the world unless you’re really into that sort of thing.
8 Answers2025-08-17
The cloud is your friend. All of your purchased titles are stored in the ‘Cloud’ tab, not just what you have downloaded. In order to view the same list of titles on your devices, you need to make sure you are viewing the correct filter. On your app’s library page, click ‘All’ or ‘Cloud’ at the top of the page instead of ‘Downloaded’. This will show you a list of all of the titles that you own, regardless of whether they are on the device that you are currently using. By syncing your library, you are also syncing the cloud view of your library and your current reading position. Make sure to enable Whispersync on all of your devices and visit the cloud view of your library regularly to click ‘Sync’. New purchases that you make on any device will be reflected in the cloud view of your library on all of your devices. This is not a file transfer situation. This is just a matter of acknowledging that you have a master list of titles in the sky, and each of your devices needs to acknowledge that same list.