You bought one of Amazon’s International Kindles and now you regret it. Not only can you not access the web (apart from Wikipedia) but you can’t even buy from Amazon’s full range of Kindle books. Worse, your local newspaper probably isn’t listed, and if it is, it comes without pictures. And if you want to read your favorite blogs, you’re completely out of luck: Not even the for-pay option is available to you.
Fear not, poor non-U.S. buyer, because we’re here to help. Here’s how you can un-cripple your International Kindle.
First, you’ll need sources for your books and other content. Thankfully, there is an internet, and while nobody but Amazon will sell you DRMed content that works on a Kindle, plenty of alternatives exist. Google books and the Gutenberg Project you know already — these are great if you like Jane Austen and they’re free.
But if you want newer titles, things are more troublesome. E-books are currently mired in the same foolish protection schemes as music was a few years back. The answer is, sadly, piracy, and while we don’t recommend it, Google or the ancient but still very active usenet is all you need to track down almost any title.
And then there is free content. Many newspapers publish everything online, and there are some great long-form blogs suited to e-books. There is also Instapaper, the beloved “read-later” service that clips and reformats web pages for, well, reading later. Instapaper has a little-known beta service that will mail clipped articles to your Kindle, stripped of junk and nicely formatted, once a week. You’ll have to pay Amazon’s data charges, but as these are text files they’re rather small, so it won’t cost much. It is also the best way to make your own, custom newspaper.
So, you have a lot of legally acquired but poorly formatted books, along with the addresses of your favorite blogs and newspapers. How do you get all that onto the Kindle?
Calibre is a clunky piece of software with looks only a mother could love. It is also very powerful, kind of like an iTunes for e-books, and runs on OS X, Windows and Linux.
The first trick is file-conversion. Amazon’s own service works well enough, but you have to mail in the files and wait to get them back. It also has trouble with complex documents.
Calibre can crunch pretty much everything into a format your Kindle can read. It’ll rescue hideously formatted text files, adding paragraph and page breaks where none could be seen before, and it will even squish pictures down to a smaller size. For most people, the presets will be enough, but you can dig in and get your hands dirty with regular expressions and advanced options.
And once you’re done, you can retrieve cover art and metadata from the internet and add keywords for easy sorting. Is this starting to sound familiar?
From there, you can send books direct to the Kindle (or other reading device — most are supported) and even delete old ones. It really is like iTunes for books.
Calibre’s best trick, though, is its Fetch News feature. This works just like podcasting, only it’s for text (and pictures). Choose from a built-in list of newspapers and magazines (Wired.com is in there) and it will scrape the site at scheduled intervals and crunch the articles into an e-reader-friendly form. When you plug your Kindle into the computer, Calibre sees it and automagically sends the new issues across. They’re formatted just like the newspapers you might buy from Amazon.
Dig a little further and you can add custom sources. Plug in the URL of a newsfeed, choose persistence and schedules and you’re good to go. Calibre will grab any new items and package them up into an e-newspaper for you. It can even grab your feeds from Google Reader or Instapaper (and it does a better job that Instapaper’s own solution).
It’s far from polished, and under the hood the Python scripts which go out and do the dirty work sometimes cause your computer’s fans to spin up like leaf-blowers, but it works, and it is almost ridiculously powerful. It is also free and open source, and exactly the kind of thing we will likely never see from the likes of Amazon, Sony or Apple because of licensing restrictions.
For the small inconvenience of plugging your e-reader in every morning, you can turn it into what it should have been all along: The all-media reading device found in a million sci-fi novels.
Product page [Calibre]
Product page [Instapaper]
Instapaper on Kindle [Instapaper Blog]
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