I gotta have my orange juice.

Jesu, Juva

Kindle

with 2 comments

I bought a basic Kindle recently and I’m enjoying it. I don’t currently plan to buy many e-books, but rather use the Kindle as a better tool for existing reading compared to my computer and phone. Here’s what I’ve discovered so far:

PDFs

I’ve found a number of free books in PDF form that I plan to work through:

  • A number of books and articles by James Jordan are available at Biblical Horizons. Through New Eyes is a great introduction to Jordan’s work if you are unfamiliar with him.
  • Gary North has a number of books available for free. At a minimum, right now I plan to work through some of the books by North, David Chilton, Ken Gentry and George Grant.
  • There are a number of free books available at the von Mises Institute. Bruno Leoni’s Freedom and the Law in particular comes highly recommended, and I’ve just finished Henry Hazlitt’s outstanding Economics in One Lesson.

There are also lots of books available at Project Gutenberg and the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

PDF’s aren’t the best format for reading on Kindle. I’ve found two tools for converting PDFs to e-books and uploading them to my Kindle. For simple PDFs (e.g., single column, and not a scanned image), Calibre is great for converting and uploading. However, Calibre does a poor job with PDFs that are scanned copies of books (this applies to many of the books linked above). For these I use a two-step process: first, I run the PDF through the K2PDFOpt tool (at the time of this writing, version 1.63 crashes for me on some books, but 1.51 is stable). This increases the size of the PDF file significantly, but it organizes it in a form that Calibre is much better able to handle. Then I use Calibre to convert these PDFs to e-books, and upload them to my Kindle.

Articles

Until now, I saved longer articles and blog posts for later reading using open tabs in my browser. This quickly grows unwieldy. The Instapaper service allows you to save web pages for later reading, and it integrates with Kindle. Now when I run across a longer article, I click a button to send it to Instapaper, and by the next morning the article is ready to read on my Kindle.

Blogs

The Kindlefeeder service allows you to send blog and news feeds to your Kindle. I’ve selected several of the blogs I read (ones that tend to have longer articles) to be sent to my Kindle, and now I read them there rather than on my computer.

Other

If you have any other tips and tricks I’d appreciate hearing about them.

All of the above should work with e-readers other than Kindle. In the case of Instapaper and Kindlefeeder, you may need to upload a file manually to your reader instead of having it automatically sent there.

Written by Scott Moonen

December 26, 2012 at 3:17 pm

Posted in Books, Miscellany, Tools

2 Responses

Subscribe to comments with RSS.

  1. I don’t know if you use Google Reader, but it’s my preferred RSS reader since it syncs across machines. If so, you can tweak the “Send to” options to include Instapaper/Readability/ReadItNow/Pocket so you can defer blog posts or other internet finds to be read later on your ebook. I’m learning the ropes on my Nook and doing the same sort of thing.

    Tim Chase

    December 26, 2012 at 9:06 pm

    • Thanks! Yes, I do use Reader. I haven’t had occasion to use this yet, but I think the Instapaper bookmarklet will inspect the currently selected article in Reader and queue it up.

      Scott Moonen

      December 26, 2012 at 9:12 pm


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this:
https://scottmoonen.com/2012/12/26/kindle/
scottmoonen.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-27
86320
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:XFFKZE4CQ4YDXMBMU67NOEF44QGZDXVU
<urn:uuid:5d0747a8-a2b5-4ea4-8d68-85c85a67d952>
2022-06-28T07:08:29Z
192.0.78.24
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:G27TBMX65WQL4SYHFZMMYZ77CYTL7LV4
<urn:uuid:50664839-b13b-4fdb-ad34-6aeef2351a57>
https://scottmoonen.com/2012/12/26/kindle/
response
<urn:uuid:204785ac-a1c6-40b7-b5d1-20d39f87fde1>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-27
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for June/July 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-171
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.3-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/