First I tried emailing it to myself because I know iphones can open a EPUB file in iBooks, but Android isn’t as user friendly or at least the Kindle app. So next I hooked my Android phone to my PC through the USB and then opened the Kindle folder and dragged and dropped the mobi file into the Kindle folder. I unplugged the USB, launched the Kindle app and saw my book cover right in my library. I clicked on the cover and there was nothing but a white screen and then after a few seconds of trying to move to the next page or get any sort of response the Kindle app kept crashing. I tried multiple times and kept trying and it kept crashing. I know my Kindle app is up to date so I don’t know what it could be. I performed this same procedure with my Nook app and dragged my EPUB version of my book to the My Documents folder in the Nook app and it worked like a charm.
Please see my reply above to Erin Ivy. One thing I want to mention is that the Android Kindle app doesn’t have a documents folder when I hook it up to my PC.
***EDIT: Also, I don’t believe that the Kindle App for Android supports sending ebooks to my Amazon account and then opening it up in the app. I think it has to be manually transferred or a book bought from Amazon.
Yes, I meant it literally when I said the “Kindle’s” document folder. I was referring specifically to the Kindle hardware (Fire in this case). I’ve never used the Android app because the only Android device I have is the Fire—which doesn’t need a separate Kindle app obviously.
However, assuming the Kindle Android is is similar to the iOS app (and it probably is in all of the ways that matter for this purpose), you should be able to e-mail to it. Go to the Amazon account page, and access the Manage Your Kindle area. In the left sidebar, choose “Personal Document Settings”. The device should be listed near the top. You can add an @Kindle.com e-mail address to it, there. Make sure your sending account is in the approved list below, then send a .mobi attachment to the address you chose. Give a few minutes, and then open the Kindle app on the Android device. It should pop up in the Home screen, download, and be ready for reading.
I read over the Kindle personal documents settings help on Amazon.com and it doesn’t list the Android platform as one of the ones that supports sending your personal docs to your kindle email address and then accessing them. So I won’t be able to do that.
It must be the Android Kindle app that’s giving me these problems. So I guess I’ll just have to hope that when I publish my book on Amazon, that it works properly on Android devices. I’m sure it will but it would be nice to test out my book on my smaller screen before I publish.
If anyone has any other ideas, please to share. If not, no worries. I’m going to try to not worry about this too much right now.
UPDATE: I was just looking through the reviews in the Android Market for the Kindle app and there’s multiple complaints from users about transferred .mobi books not working, the app crashing, personal notes disappearing, and other errors since the newest update 3.4.1. So most likely the problems I’m having are the Android app’s fault. I’m going to try to revert back to the older version of the app or wait till the bugs are worked out in this one.
UPDATE 2: I emailed Amazon to let them know about the bug. They replied saying that mobi documents can’t be transferred by USB to an Android device and then opened in the Kindle app to be read. So there’s the answer.
I realize this post is YEARS later, but in case someone else is also searching for help in HOW TO COMPILE AN EBOOK in Scrivener–simply dedicated to the COMPILE portion of the task, I have just completed the easy step-by-step guide ($2.99) from Amazon called: Beautiful eBooks with Scrivener: Master the Compile Function and Create Distribution-ready eBooks
