I’m going to buy a kindle paperback (I’ve never had one), and I’m sure I’m not going to buy any books for it. What mods/steps/other stuff do you guys suggest to set it up?
I’m going to buy a kindle paperback (I’ve never had one), and I’m sure I’m not going to buy any books for it. What mods/steps/other stuff do you guys suggest to set it up?
No mods required whatsoever, just get your ebooks in whichever format you can and then use https://calibre-ebook.com/ to convert them to .mobi and copy them over via cable. If possible, avoid pdf’s - they can be converted, but it often looks shit. EPUB on the other hand converts with zero loss, and that’s the most common format on libgen.rs and other ebook sites. If MOBI is available right away, just go for that of course. Conversion takes mere seconds though.
Since I don’t buy any ebooks from Amazon directly, I’ve set my kindle to flight mode right after the initial setup and haven’t switched it back on in over 4 years.
+1 for Calibre, it’s the only thing you need. Get MOBI, AZW, or EPUB formats and you’re good to go.
Just to be clear, there’s no reason to keep your Kindle in airplane mode all the time, except to extend battery life (which helps a lot, honestly). Amazon doesn’t punish you for having pirated ebooks on it. Also it’s nice to have software updates periodically, they sometimes add nice features.
Yeah battery life was my prime use case, and since I really don’t do anything but reading on the kindle, I haven’t yet come across any potentially missing feature. Didn’t they also serve ads at some point? I feel like if the kindle is disconnected from the internet for >30 days, the cached ads expire and that’s that.
For non-fiction and notes taking I’m using the reMarkable 2, that’s honestly a game changer. And it displays books in large enough size to view unmodified pdfs.
Preventing the updates is also another benefit of airplane mode if youre planning to jailbreak the kindle eventually.
Correct, if you have the ad-supported version it will display ads if you let it check in again. So keeping it on airplane mode is an option to avoid that. Or you could just pay $20 to Amazon to remove the ads. I hear if you whine to customer support they might remove them for free, but haven’t tried it.
You don’t have to whine -literally just get on a chat and ask them ‘please can you remove these ads’ - they’ve done it for two kindles for me no charge, no question.
I don’t even know if I have the ad supported version, it’s been that long. They kept pushing bestsellers onto my screen, but I don’t know if those were ads or if that’s considered a regular feature.
Yeah Thats the ad supported version - you dont get that once removed.
Good to know. It’s removed itself then thanks to flight mode, so I’ll just keep it as it is :)
another +1 for calibre.
As someone who can never find the right cable, I like using calibre’s content server. You start it up then open up the kindles built in browser and go to the listed address and download your books from there.