My Kindle Workflow

2 min read (381 words)

Foreword

Kindle has become one of my most valuable tools, so I'm writing this article to document my complete Kindle workflow.

Finding a good book

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

— Mortimer J. Adler

Honestly, it's not easy to find a good book. One day, you're browsing your social media and see someone you follow recommending a book. You start reading it, but then realize it's an obscure book, lose interest in reading, and return to scrolling through your phone.

I always choose books based on my interests, knowledge level, and recommendations from like-minded people. Interest increases my motivation to finish a book. If my knowledge is insufficient, I might quickly feel overwhelmed by the content, despite being interested in the topic. Recommendations from people with similar tastes serve as a simple yet effective recommendation algorithm.

Finding the Right eBook Version

After deciding which book to read, the next step is finding a suitable eBook version.

Sources for eBooks

Amazon Kindle store is the most direct option. Some public e-libraries are also good alternatives:

  • z-Library
  • Anna's Archive

I always prefer the epub format because it allows me to customize the font family.

Say goodbye to the abridged version

Due to censorship in China, many books in Simplified Chinese are abridged. In such cases, you can choose either the Traditional Chinese version or the original language edition.

Translating eBook (option)

If the ebook is not in a language you're familiar with, you can translate it by:

  1. Importing the ebook into the software Calibre
  2. Downloading the Calibre plugin Ebook Translator
  3. Translate the book

Besides the free translation engines, you can use your own LLM API. If you can't afford that and the free translation engines don't work well, you can switch to DeepLX.

The author of DeepLX also provides a free DeepLX API. If your GitHub account is more than 3 years old, you can get 500,000 tokens per day; otherwise, you'ss get 10,000 tokens per day.

{
  "name": "DeepLX Translator",
  "languages": {
    "source": {
      "English": "en",
      "Chinese": "zh",
      "Japanese": "ja",
      "Korean": "ko",
      "French": "fr",
      "German": "de",
      "Spanish": "es",
      "Portuguese": "pt",
      "Italian": "it",
      "Russian": "ru"
    },
    "target": {
      "English": "en",
      "Chinese": "zh",
      "Japanese": "ja",
      "Korean": "ko",
      "French": "fr",
      "German": "de",
      "Spanish": "es",
      "Portuguese": "pt",
      "Italian": "it",
      "Russian": "ru"
    }
  },
  "request": {
    "url": "https://deeplx.missuo.ru/translate?key=<API KEY>",
    "method": "POST",
    "headers": {
      "Content-Type": "application/json",
      "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
    },
    "data": {
      "source_lang": "<source>",
      "target_lang": "<target>",
      "text": "<text>"
    }
  },
  "response": "response['data']"
}

Transferring files

Use Send to Kindle.