Too bad Amazon isn’t doing nonDRMed ePub to make it easier for books to be read across a number of platforms.
But if you use a Linux desktop and are sufficiently adventuresome, yes, you can use the Wine Windows simulator to run Kindle for PC.
Details at Lifehacker. Anyone care to tell how the tip there works out?
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 11:20 am and is filed under Amazon, Amazon Kindle, E-books and all that, Linux, e-book economics, e-book ergonomics, e-book pricing, e-book technology, e-books, e-books and other digipubs, ePub, ebook pricing, ebook publishing, ebook readers, ebooks. . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Also, please note that if you're commenting for the first time, your remarks will be held for moderation. If you still have problems, email TeleRead Co-Editor Paul Biba. Pinging is currently not allowed.
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November 17th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Did a fresh WINE install with yum to my Fedora Core 11 workstation, followed the procedure exactly, works just fine.
I would like to figure out how it selects the font (unfortunately the app does not offer a choice to the user)… on Linux I see a sans-serif font whereas on Windows it’s serif. Either way it’s readable.
Thanks for the pointer to the tip!
November 17th, 2009 at 11:46 pm
That’s a big pile of hoops to jump through, just for the privilege of reading DRM’d books on a GPL platform. It’s no surprise that there’s been so little effort to do this. I would imagine that most Linux users would have it in their DNA to resist the Kindle approach. (By contrast, there are a number of good quality Linux ePub readers and library organizers.)
Linux desktop users, almost by definition, are already a fairly adventuresome lot. It seems to me that they’re just rather selective on the challenges worth pursuing.
November 18th, 2009 at 12:31 am
Doesn’t work on the Mac under Wine with Winebottler. No fonts show up. Easiest way to do it is to use Parallels or Fusion.
November 18th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
got it to work on Ubuntu 9.10, but had to go through the Kindle for PC help page to understand how to sync; can’t just get the content through the browser (at least this first shot) but had to go to my kindle-account settings page and manually tell it to d/l the book.
I’m happy enough with that, but I suspect a lot of folks won’t be. But it isn’t Linux unless you fiddle! Not a lot of folks are on Linux anyhow.
The instructions at Lifehacker were very helpful in configuring Wine to work with K4PC.
December 1st, 2009 at 4:59 pm
To enable the fonts just open wine configuration and in the Applications tab Add click on Add Applications. After adding the KindleForPC choose windows 98 as the windows version.