Kindle workflow

In December I acquired my first e-reader, a Kindle Paperwhite.

I’ve been reading very few books for the last few years, although in truth I have been reading: mainly reddit posts or pinboard popular bookmarks. Lauren’s been using an e-Reader for 4-5 years now, and she recently got a Paperwhite, so after seeing hers I decided I’d try it.

With the Kindle, I’m definitely reading more books. I’m also reading several books at once, which I’ve never done before, but with the Kindle there’s no hassle in trading multiple books and finding bookmarks. Lauren and I also enabled the Kindle Family Library, which lets you share Kindle books across accounts.

I also wanted to learn more about other content providers, and from that I found Calibre. Lauren had used Calibre a few years ago but it didn’t fit her needs well. After installing it, I learned that recipes are written in Python, and I became more interested.

My biggest “win” with the Kindle has been using a recipe called “Pinboard-Recipe”–I even contributed a bit of code to it! This recipe goes through your pinboard unread bookmarks, selects the 15 most recent bookmarks, and creates a magazine that Calibre can then send to the Kindle via its email address.

Over the last ~5 years I’ve bookmarked over 600 things with pinboard’s “read later” function, but I’ve never come back to read them. Now, I’m reading all kinds of good longer articles, and I can switch back and forth between them and traditional books.

Also Calibre makes it really easy (trivial, even) to load a Project Gutenberg book to the Kindle. I finally finished Typee.

Finally, I sorted out when I use Amazon wishlists vs. goodreads lists. I use goodreads for books I want to read, and wishlists for things I want to purchase. I added a couple of goodreads shelves: “read-soon” for a subset of “to-read” that I actually plan to read in the near future, and “owned” to indicate whether I own the book in one medium or another.