To cut a long story short, the rumor says Amazon nukes all sideloaded books marked as EBOK because they weren't technically bought on the Kindle Store.
The proposed solution is to mark them as PDOC as Calibre still tags all sideloaded books as EBOK and it still doesn't offer an easy way to change the tag, we are going to hack an existing plugin.
If you're using KFX or MOBI, skip these steps.
But if you want to use AZW3, read the following instructions:
- Download and install the QualityCheck plugin from Calibre
- Go to your calibre plugins folder (\Roaming\calibre\plugins)
- Extract the "check_fix.py" file from the Quality Check.zip
- With a text editor, modify the following lines
to...
- Save changes, and then copy it back to the Quality Check.zip, overwriting the original check_fix.py file
- In calibre, convert any book to AZW3
- Open the QualityCheck plugin > Fix > Fix ASIN for Kindle Fire.
- Your AZW3 book is now a PDOC.
You can use any metadata viewer to see if the book is actually a PDOC.
But I use MOBI/KFX. What do I do?
MOBI files can be set to PDOC, you can check this on Calibre Preferences > Output Options > MOBI. However, this might not work for every Kindle out there and they might still be deleted by Amazon
For KFX books (you can convert books as KFX by installing KFX Output plugin), you can tell Calibre to always tag converted books as PDOC. (Calibre Preferences > Output Options > KFX Output > "Create personal document").
Is this the confirmed solution?
Maybe, there haven't been reports of PDOC books getting deleted so far, here is one report claiming their PDOC tags weren't nuked.
But why not just use Send To Kindle? Isn't that easier? Plus it has all the KFX and highlights stuff!!
Alright then, go ahead and use the Amazon cloud.