BookFusion Hosts Your eBook Library Online

Amazon, Google, and a couple other companies give you free online storage for your personal ebooks and let you read the ebooks in their apps/ereaders. (Another, Libreture, charges 3 pounds per month.)

Another competing service just crossed my desk.

BookFusion is a 3-year-old ebook startup, and one of the things it does is enable organizations and institutions to host and maintain private ebook and document libraries (Bluefire has a similar service). There is also a consumer option which is free at this time.

The neat thing about BookFusion  is that you can upload DRM-free Epub ebooks, store them in a personal library, and then use its Android, iOS, and browser app to read them. I'm still testing the system, but it looks nice so far:

BookFusion Hosts Your eBook Library Online e-Reading Software With Amazon dominating the ebook market, there will never be a huge market for this idea in the US, although other markets centered on DRM-free or watermarked ebooks (Netherlands, Poland, etc) could use this type of service.

And frankly, so long as Amazon continues to neglect their version of this personal ebook library idea, there will be a market for this.

The thing is, Amazon has been hosting ebooks uploaded by its customers since 2011, but the feature has never been a priority for Amazon and thus has worked very well.

On the Fire tablet, for example, Amazon puts personal ebooks in an entirely separate app called "Docs" rather than including them with all the other ebooks. Amazon also frequently misplaces  those personal ebooks (I currently have a half-dozen ebooks on my Fire tablet that I cannot find).

It is annoying enough that I wonder just how many people are reading their own ebooks on Amazon's hardware.

Do you?

About Nate Hoffelder (10079 Articles)
Nate Hoffelder is the founder and editor of The Digital Reader:"I've been into reading ebooks since forever, but I only got my first ereader in July 2007. Everything quickly spiraled out of control from there. Before I started this blog in January 2010 I covered ebooks, ebook readers, and digital publishing for about 2 years as a part of MobileRead Forums. It's a great community, and being a member is a joy. But I thought I could make something out of how I covered the news for MobileRead, so I started this blog."

19 Comments on BookFusion Hosts Your eBook Library Online

  1. I am annoyed Amazon treats everything you put on your Kindle as a “personal document,” whether it’s a shopping list in MS Word or a fully formatted MOBI ebook. It’s mildly annoying when you have to be sure the home screen is set to “all” and not “books” but it’s truly aggravating when the notes and highlights from those “documents” don’t show up in the web interface for highlights. However since I always email the “documents,” I use GMail as a backup for retrieving them as needed. Oddly, I haven’t noticed any going missing, but I have had a couple of things the Kindle won’t let me delete.

    • Hi Carmen Webster Buxton,

      We provide you with the option to both read your eBooks on any device while also being able to send your eBooks to your kindle easily using the send to kindle option.

      Your eBooks will always be organized on a single bookshelf and available for you to read on any device.

      Best,
      Dwayne

  2. I have never had problem finding my “personal documents” on a Kindle device or app. The only issue I had is if I use the Send-to-Kindle convert service with the wrong format but at least I get an email replay that it was in the wrong format.

  3. I myself have joined the ranks of “those who read third-party books on an Amazon device”. Since I just bought an Oasis, but the vast majority of my library are EPUBs bought from B&N and Kobo, I’ve been doing a lot of conversion to MOBI to get the files onto the Oasis. (With judicious settings of [EBOK] tags to make damn sure the files actually show up under ‘Books’.)

  4. If you upload illustrated ebooks to Amazon, they compress the very hell out of them. White areas, those that are supposed to be pure white, will end up with zillion grey speckles. Which, admittedly, is easily overlooked on a Kindle e-ink device, but it’s ugly on a tablet….

    Of course, when a service is free, one can’t complain too much! And for all I know, BookFusion may do the same. But I’m glad to know about them and may check it out. Wonder what the uploading limits are….

  5. I use EPUB on the Fire tablets I own. Works great.

  6. There are other services for storage and reading of your books:
    – Bookmate (just ignore their offers to subscribe and set books private so you don’t populate their collection). Web reader. iOS and Android apps. No in-book search. EPUB(and FB2) support. No support for complex ebook formatting at all (even tag is not supported).
    - Bookari - iOS/Android app. No web reader. Paid (free option is mininal). Their main targets appears to be their apps. It's possible to DOWNLOAD books you uploaded to them.

  7. You can also roll your own. I use Calibre on Ubuntu with the library in Dropbox. To download books, I use Calibre Companion on my Energy Sistem Android reader connected to the Calibre library in Dropbox.

    I’ve tried Bookari but the set up I have now works much better for me.

  8. Looks intriguing, but I’d be worried it won’t stay free for long. For now my growing ePub book collection (plus a few PDF books) is in cloud storage with Mega, which gives 50 GB of storage for free. It’s easy to download to my iPad anytime and I use my computer to transfer books to my Kobo as needed.

    • Jennifer, try actually use Bookfusion (as I did). Their free offer have limits on file size and on total number of files, you will be told about them if go too far. You will be asked to subscribe long before that (I think subscription price is more than worth their value. It was for me. After less than one day testing. Even while I use other cloud syncing readers and only think about switch).
      Their product is rather good even if it have some issues like lack of documentation (One example: they support fb2 but only if you load via web browser and only way you can find about that is from their post on MobileRead).

      They also have paid business/education offerings (as in ‘your company creates library for employees’), and their own store/publisher program.

      I’m grateful to Nate for information about them.

    • Hi Jennifer,

      We will always have a free tier but we do have a premium tier for heavy readers with no upload limits.

      We are not just a storage services for books but a fully integrated platform that allows you to read and sync your eBooks across any device https://www.bookfusion.com/reading/cloud-library

      Best,
      Dwayne
      BookFusion- Founder

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published.


*


This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this:
https://the-digital-reader.com/2018/03/15/bookfusion-hosts-your-ebook-library-online/
the-digital-reader.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-34
72949
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:XMS5CAO227UXJH5ONKW2SZFIJSRW5CQK
<urn:uuid:ebf04ac9-b8e2-42ca-aab7-814b77e38ae9>
2018-08-20T22:11:08Z
104.27.129.155
text/html
sha1:BHU2MNNK7OE4X6AN4BIU6JTIVRAQWZWZ
<urn:uuid:feba9e73-0445-4d76-951b-eb665eeba352>
https://the-digital-reader.com/2018/03/15/bookfusion-hosts-your-ebook-library-online/
response
<urn:uuid:1717b798-4879-41fb-969b-0b7c83f9a51f>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-34
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2018
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-178-226-67.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/