Posted by Mikko Lehtinen on Friday 01. October 2010 | Tagged as hardware, kindle

I just received my new Kindle3 from Amazon. So far it seems like a great device for the price (150 EUR shipped to Finland, including all expenses). The screen is great, battery lasts long and size and weight are good for e-reader. The UI is still clumsy and feels very outdated, but with a little tweaking, it does the job. First things I did was:

Basics

When reading PDFs use Aa key to change zoom level, contrast and screen orientation. I’m reading most of PDF files horizontally, which gives you nice zoom for smaller font sizes. Most often I prefer to convert PDF to mobi using Calibre (see below)

Calibre for e-book syncing

Calibre for managing and syncing your e-books. It seems to be buggy in the newest release (calibre-0.7.20), but old releases can be found from SourceForge.
To convert a pdf to a mobibook, run:
/Applications/calibre.app/Contents/Resources/loaders/ebook-convert input-filename.pdf output-filename.mobi

Ephemera

Ephemera gives you two-way Instapaper.com sync for your ebook reader without Whispernet traffic fees. However, with Kindle3 it’s probably easiest to either download new articles through Instapaper website or even easier to order updates by e-mail.

Start hacking

Read Kindle Boards and MobileRead Forums to read about latest development on your device. There’s Jailbreak and other hacks available, but yet without any useful functionality.