Re: [Bibdesk-users] Adding Kindle books to BibDesk records

[Christiaan H. <cmh...@gm...>]

On Jan 25, 2012, at 12:22, Fischlin Andreas wrote:

> Dear Derick,
> 
> Thanks for this useful hint. However, I believe your instructions contain errors. At least the Content Folder by default seems to be another one (you probably changed yours via the preferences or have a different history of the application on your system). AFAIK the default location is:
> 
> 	- ~/Library/Application Support/Kindle/My Kindle Content/
> 
> but you can change it to any other location via the preferences.
> 
> Moreover, it seems quite important to use only a Finder alias, and not a symbolic link or BibDesk will remove the .azw from the Kindle repository if you have Auto File active.
> 
> Regards,
> Andreas
> 

This is not correct, BibDesk autofiles both Finder alias files and symlink files, not their target files.

> On 20/Jan/2012, at 19:25 , Derick Fay wrote:
> 
>> Here's something I just figured out.  I am in the habit of using BibDesk as an organizer / file manager for all of my scholarly reading these days, and I have some books on Kindle for the Mac that I wanted to be able to launch from BibDesk.
>> 
>> Kindle books are stored in ~/Documents/My Kindle Content but the filenames are meaningless.  So the solution I found was
>> 
>> 1) navigate to ~/Documents/My Kindle Content
>> 
>> 2) open a .azw file - this will launch Kindle for Mac and open the book so you can see which book it is
>> 
>> 3) (in the Finder) make an alias for the .azw file you just opened, with a recognizable name
>> 
>> 4) add the alias to the appropriate BibDesk record.
>> 
>> This will work - allowing launching of the Kindle book from within BibDesk - even if Autofile is on.  I didn't try it, but I assume that if one just Autofiled the .azw files, Kindle for Mac would have problems since they'd no longer be in the expected location.
>> 
>> It's a bit of a pain at first, if you have a lot of books, but unless Amazon makes book titles visible through Applescript (fat chance!) I don't see a way it could be automated.
>> 
>> --Derick

I don't have a Kindle, so I don't know how this works. Does it just look what files are there in a given location, or does it maintain a database of available files? But you're probably right that autofile of the original .azw files would screw things up. One thing you could do is to do autofile manually, or do the autofiling in a script hook instead so you can manage it more to your liking (e.g. replace by a link automatically, or not to file when it's in a certain directory).

Christiaan