LWN on the Kindle [LWN.net]

LWN on the Kindle

Posted Jan 19, 2012 15:31 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

You can do this with a tiny cron job that runs something like

ebook-convert "LWN.net Weekly Edition.recipe" \
~/tmp/conversion/lwn-$(date +"%Y-%m-%d").mobi \
--output-profile=kindle --username=$USERNAME \
--password=$PASSWORD --keep-ligatures --smarten-punctuation && \
calibre-smtp -a ~/tmp/conversion/lwn-$(date +"%Y-%m-%d").mobi \
-s "LWN subscription" -r your.mail.srvr -p 25 -e NONE \
your@email.address your-kindle-address@free.kindle.com ""

Caveats: obviously your LWN username and password need setting up: so does your mailserver (encryption is supported); your@email.address should be one of the email addresses permitted to send email to your Kindle on Amazon's management pages, and your-kindle-address@free.kindle.com should obviously enough be your Kindle address. (This is a wifi-only address: omitting the 'free' will use 3G if your Kindle has it, but will charge you for the privilege if it does so.)

Aside: now that the horrible security-hole-filled Calibre mount helper is gone and udisks is our only hope, I'm very impressed by how well it worked. I expected to have to jump through agonizing hoops to teach it that no I do not want the Kindle mounted on /media/Main or wherevertheheck it is that's hardwired into the source code. All such worries were superfluous: udisks figured out the udev-and-/etc/fstab dance that was mounting it on /mnt/kindle on my system, and mounted it there itself with no problems. Impressive.