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.
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.
Set it to airplane mode the day it arrives and never let it go online with the stock firmware if you value privacy - these beasts even send amazon the page you are reading currently on. Calibre is the best tool, it autoconverts anything if needed. It also has an RSS-to-newspaper feature that can create a custom newspaperlike magazine from your favorite feeds for you. Reading manga on Kindle is really fun.
Seconding the Calibre recommendation!
I jailbroke my old Kindle paperwhite a while ago and installed Koreader on it and just read Epub through that without having to convert anything. No internet, no amazon and you can get second hand Kindles for cheap.
Kindles can read epubs now anyway. You literally don’t have to do anything.
if you want to jailbreak it, there’s a spreadsheet somewhere detailing which models to avoid
but honestly, before i figured out i could jailbreak mine, i was just using it in airplane mode 24/7 and transferring stuff over usb with the EXCELLENT software Calibre. highly highly recommend! the only benefit i get from the jailbreak is that i can use a more customizable reader (fonts, margins, night mode), and that i can now transfer stuff from Calibre over wi-fi without having to create an amazon account. bliss!
