In today’s post, a set of hacks I’ve used to read more efficiently. Most of this is India specific, and your mileage may vary.
Chapter 1: The Pledge
Without getting into the books vs e-readers debate, the kindle has been life changing for me. I continue to read printed books, but the kindle really shines when it comes to reading newsletters, earnings calls transcripts and research papers.
Here’s how I went about it:
This is the base kindle oasis. It is absurdly priced.
Amazon has a generous return policy on its own products - fire sticks, kindles and the like. So people return kindles all the time, usually right after unboxing them and realising ₹21,999 is far too much for one.
Amazon accepts the return, and relists the item without its original packaging.
Why they don’t call it the rekindle, I’ll never understand. Anyway, this item at ₹15,399 is still way overpriced. For reasons passing understanding, the price fluctuates quite a bit though. From keepa:
The price fluctuates between ₹11000 and ₹18999 for the same item. Guess what price I bought mine at?
Fair warning: I don’t think this product is covered under warranty. And some reviews do mention battery and screen issues.
Chapter 2: The Turn
If you are a prime subscriber, you’re also eligible for the Prime Reading program. You can “borrow” from a huge catalogue of eBooks, which will be delivered to your kindle free of cost and which you can “return” once you’re done. The vast, vast majority of titles are trash. But that’s part of the fun, no? For children especially, there’s plenty of Ruskin Bond, Marvel and DC comics, Chacha Chaudhary, and the complete Peanuts catalogue.
Chapter 3: The Prestige
Now for the most important bit. You can read any pdf on your new (but not new new) kindle.
After you’ve setup your kindle with your Amazon account, it is assigned a unique email ID automatically. This should be visible on your Amazon dashboard and reads “xyz@kindle.com”. You can change this to a more easy-to-recall ID too.
Any pdf you mail to this ID from your registered email, with the subject line “Convert” and no other text in the body of the mail, will automatically get pushed to your kindle in an optimised format. It’s less cumbersome than it sounds, but still far from seamless. Images, tables and other such features will get mangled quite badly. But it works great for just text.
Happy Reading, and leave me a comment if you’re stuck at any part of the process. We’ll figure it out.
Am stuck on just one point. What do you mean by reading? And what is kindle?