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There are books that I cannot obtain in the bookstore or amazon prime. For those books I'd like to be able to access them wherever I am (from all my devices, even if I get a new mac book). I also wish to be able to save all the notes in them and have that accessible. I assume one would new to sync in the cloud.

Is this possible?

I see the pdfs are in my computer's readers but I cannot have them sync between devices like, say, mendeley or evernote would.

kindle isn't important. What is important is that my pdfs are available everywhere. Ideally backup with annotations. That doesn't seem to work on either. Thats the crux of my question. Which app is mostly irrelevant.

Note that I strongly prefer to have have it work on 1) kindle or 2)iBooks in that order if possible but if it works on either that would be fantastic.

related:

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Put all you PDF in iCloud and they will sync everywhere.

Kindle doesn't play with iCloud or AppleID or iBooks in iOS 14 or earlier - nor on Mac.

Your best bet is to have kindle sync the content you got from them only and have Apple sync the content you choose to purchase and store in Books and iCloud. (Like PDF libraries and such)

There’s no technical reason Amazon doesn’t use Apple API. It’s just platform, business, privacy, control issues from what I can tell as a developer with access to the API and design docs on Apple side. As a consumer, I am steering more an more of my purchases away from Amazon since their walled garden doesn’t work for me as well as Apple’s walled garden. I love O’Reilly subscription as well so I’m mostly content to let Amazon be Amazon and use a physical kindle when I can’t get what I need elsewhere. I rarely use the kindle apps on Mac since they just make me sad and frustrated, tbh. I don’t blame them (Apple or Amazon), I just use the paper white kindle for what it’s great at and the iPad for what it’s great at.

All my PDF are in iCloud now and those I need a proper reader, I open in books or another third party app if I need to mark them up or organize them more rigorously than iBooks allows. Most I read out of the files app in practice. I never could get Kindle to work with my stuff. Perhaps someone else with years of trying has a better approach. Maybe I can learn a better way like you are asking.

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    kindle isn't important. What is important is that my pdfs are available everywhere. That doesn't seem to work on either. Thats the crux of my question. Which app is mostly irrelevant.
    – Charlie Parker
    Sep 19, 2020 at 13:08
  • Ok. I just moved the answer to the top. iCloud will sync everything, use it is my advice. @CharlieParker
    – bmike ♦
    Sep 19, 2020 at 13:28
  • ANY cloud service will do that. Box, OneDrive, DropBox, All of which have the benefit of being cross-platform. iCloud drive has been less than reliable on Windows for me, so I stopped using it, perhaps its better now. Don't know. Then you just have to decide on what tool to read the PDFs. If Preview doesn't cut it, there are a number of (paid) PDF programs on Mac which may offer what you need
    – Steve Chambers
    Sep 19, 2020 at 23:27
  • no. Not any. What I want is to have all my books in a single place. I am happy to buy them but unfortunately not all books are on amazon, apple books etc.
    – Charlie Parker
    Sep 20, 2020 at 23:56
  • You’re right DRM is DRM. My any is for PDF. You still have two big players - one has an API for the other to use and the other has no platform and won’t play in the API platform. @CharlieParker we all are stuck in the middle hence my answer saying you have to use both and choose where you buy.
    – bmike ♦
    Sep 21, 2020 at 1:16

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