I recently upgraded from my 8 year old Kindle Keyboard (2011) to a brand new Kindle Paperwhite (2019, generation 10). So far, it is a great upgrade. Here are some tricks that I found useful:

Custom Fonts

Connect the kindle with USB, you’ll see a folder fonts. I’ve tried a few fonts, and really like Literata. It’s very similar to Amazon’s Bookerly, and made for e-books.

Literata

It’s also the font you’ll see in the header for this post. Here’s how to install it:

  1. Go to https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Literata
  2. Click “Select this font”
  3. Click on the new popup
  4. Click the download arrow to the right.
  5. Extract and copy all .ttf fonts into the fonts folder. Copying just Literata-Regular is not enough because then the italic fonts don’t look as good as they could be. The “VariableFont” are not needed.

I’ve added a few custom themes:

  • Small: Literata, size 1, small line distance, align left
  • Normal: Literata, size 4.
  • Big: Literata, bold 1, size 5.

Calibre

Calibre

Calibre is a fantastic e-book manager. I’ve used it with a huge collection in both Windows and Linux. Most importantly, it can convert & send e-books to your kindle via the kindle-email address. Lots of good tips are in this reddit post.

  • Embed your favorite font: Some books don’t allow non-amazon fonts. Configure calibre to embed your favorite font to get around this: Choose “Common Options”, “Look & Feel”, set “Embed font family” to your preferred font. I use Literata.

Clutter-Free Home Screen

Go to “Settings”, “Device Options”, “Advanced Options”, disable “Home Screen View”.

Calibre

Books, Books, Books

Battery

Switch to Airplane mode, turn off brightness, turn off Page Refresh.

Sources