# Freetime and books that I own



## Guaps (Dec 20, 2013)

I have read several threads (here and elsewhere) about sideloading books that I already own onto my kids Kindle Fire HD.  My sons use Freetime and I do not want to load Overdrive onto their profiles.  They love to play games and given the choice of reading or games, they will choose games.  That's the power of Freetime - I can set his reading to unlimited and limit his game time.  So is there any way to get books that I already own onto the device?  This is a deal breaker for me.  I may need to return both of these if I can't do this.

Background (if you need/want it)

Emailing or uploading books through the kindle site loads into the documents folder, which is not accessible to Freetime
I tried copying books directly into the Books folder on the device.  Didn't work.
Customer service was not helpful.  They said there was no way at all - which is not true as I can see people have used overdrive to solve this issue.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Not sure what to tell you. As far as my testing shows, books that are sideloaded (I used Calibre and changed a setting to tag the transferred book correctly) will not show up in Freetime even if they show up in the "Books" tab outside of Freetime. I don't know about Overdrive--I don't have an HD--if that's something people have found works, that's what I would recommend. I don't think it works on the HDX.

Here's another thread with my discussion of my testing.
http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,168512.0.html

Betsy


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## Guaps (Dec 20, 2013)

Thank you for your reply.  I have spent a lot of time this weekend trying to figure out how to do this with very little progress so far.  I have two more ideas that I'm going to try today.  I'll report back if I find a solution.

1 - Load two different parent control apps.  One (not Freetime) would be the reader app, and Freetime to manage apps and videos.  Prob with this is my kids would have to ask for us to put in the pass everytime they want to switch between the two.  I don't love this idea, but it would work well enough to keep me from taking these back to the store.

2 - Load two different parent control apps, one inside the other.  So freetime would be set up for unlimited time on apps.  Put Overdrive in there for reading, and put the other parent control app in the app section of freetime.  Then load all the apps for games in the second parent control app.  Put time limits on the second app.  If I can disable the password of the second parent app and allow kids to pass freely between it and freetime, my problem is solved.  I'm not sure if the exit the second parent app if they return to freetime or the home screen.  I'll test and report back.


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## Guaps (Dec 20, 2013)

In case someone is following this, or wants to do this in the future, here is what I learned.

I ended up doing option #1 in the end. I don't love it, but I am not able to find a better solution so far.

Option 2 - This doesn't work. Free Time _will _allow you to load another parent control app inside, so that is great. Problem is loading apps. In order for the second parent control app to have access to a an app (a game for example), the game has to be loaded into freetime. If the app is loaded into free time, then the kids can play it. So there is no way to put a time limit on the game.


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