I’m going to buy a kindle paperback (I’ve never had one), and I’m sure I’m not going to buy any books for it. What mods/steps/other stuff do you guys suggest to set it up?

  • +1 for Calibre, it’s the only thing you need. Get MOBI, AZW, or EPUB formats and you’re good to go.

    Just to be clear, there’s no reason to keep your Kindle in airplane mode all the time, except to extend battery life (which helps a lot, honestly). Amazon doesn’t punish you for having pirated ebooks on it. Also it’s nice to have software updates periodically, they sometimes add nice features.

    • Yeah battery life was my prime use case, and since I really don’t do anything but reading on the kindle, I haven’t yet come across any potentially missing feature. Didn’t they also serve ads at some point? I feel like if the kindle is disconnected from the internet for >30 days, the cached ads expire and that’s that.

      For non-fiction and notes taking I’m using the reMarkable 2, that’s honestly a game changer. And it displays books in large enough size to view unmodified pdfs.