In Which We Discuss Moving EBooks Around

I bought my Kobo Mini 3-4 years ago.  I was broke at the time, but it was a great purchase.  When I started working again in mid 2013 I upgraded to a Kindle Paperwhite.

Though I love my Kobo Mini, and it was a good friend to me, I've gravitated more and more to reading books on the Kindle Paperwhite, especially since the Kobo will no longer hold a reasonable charge.  In essence, I no longer use the Kobo at all any more.  Which is a shame, because I have some great books on there.

While I can still use the Kobo App on my phone, or use both the Kobo and Kindle apps on my Android Tablet or PC, I'm not likely to do that.  I'm not in the habit of reading books on my PC or laptop, and we actually sold the Android Tablet, which was a gift I rarely used.  Though it was briefly useful for reading Kindle graphic novels.

In short, this has been a barrier to finishing the six unread books I still have on my Kobo.  So I've spent the last few hours transferring them onto my Kindle, as well as converting them into a handy PDF format.

This has involved a great deal of frustrated googling.

It turns out the Kobo desktop app does not create a save file on your PC, so it cannot be used to manipulate books by opening the files in Calibre or transferring them.  What you actually need to do is follow the directions here.  In short, you download Adobe Digital Editions, create a log-in, then download your books from kobo.com.  This then creates a folder called 'my digital editions' which contains the actual save files for your books.  These you can upload into calibre and do kinky things to.

After converting the files to PDF or another format that Kindle can open, simply plug your Kindle into your PC and drag the files from the Calibre folder to the Kindle folder.  I just dragged the entire folder which was labelled with the books name rather than individual files, and that seems to work.

Edit:

My Kindle claimed it was too full for me to read beyond a certain point of a PDF.  It's also had a 'ghost' copy of Peony in Love on it for a while - by 'ghost' I mean I deleted it from the Kindle, but it's still there and refuses to be deleted again.  I also noticed a load of what appeared to be junk files when I plugged it into the PC.

So I've performed a factory reset after noting down the titles I had downloaded.  This time, I moved the PDF files from Calibre alone, without all of the other files that go with them, and it worked just fine.