After using Dropbox long enough to be satisfied that its performance would remain good and my files wouldn’t spontaneously disappear, I decided to try using it in conjunction with Calibre. Calibre is an open-source and cross-platform ebook management program which organizes ebooks in all different formats and can convert between most of them. I use it to keep track of all the ebooks I’ve downloaded for my Kindle from sources other than Amazon–which is actually the majority of them. Like most open-source projects it has a ghastly user interface, but it works well despite that handicap.
Kindles are recharged through the USB cable that connects them to a computer, and I’ve been connecting mine to the Mac Pro I use for working with photos–it’s easy to plug it in and set it out of the way to recharge when sitting on a desk. However, I actually download ebooks fairly often on my laptop or generate them using Fanfiction Downloader on my PC. In the past I’ve then moved the ebooks over to my Mac Pro via iDisk, but as I’ve mentioned before iDisk doesn’t perform all that well.
Calibre lets you specify where you want your ebook library to be located in its preferences, so I moved the folder it had been using on the Mac Pro into my Dropbox and pointed Calibre to the new location. I then installed Calibre on the other two computers, and now I’ve got access to my library from three different computers. When I download an ebook on my laptop I can stick it in Calibre there, add any metadata I like, and the next time I plug my Kindle in to my Mac Pro it’s there already, waiting to be copied over to the Kindle. So far this has worked out very well.