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Calibre-Web + Readeck + KOReader + Kindle (jailbroken)

I have been a Kindle user for over 10 years. I consider e-ink technology and the e-readers built on top of it to be one of the few examples of genuinely good, widely commercialised technology of recent years.

Until not long ago I used my reader exclusively for books. Managing my collection was handled perfectly well by Calibre installed on my first — and for a long time only — laptop. It is an excellent application that offers far more features than I have ever needed. I occasionally used Amazon’s “Send to Kindle” option as well, since virtually all Polish e-book stores support it. However, I always cared about the integrity of my e-book catalogue, so I stuck with Calibre as the single source of truth.

The first problem with my original setup came from the growing number of devices entering my life: a smartphone, a second laptop, a tablet. My catalogue was accessible from one machine only. On top of that, some of my friends were warming up to e-books, and one of their many advantages is (or should be) how easy they are to share. Syncing the catalogue across devices was one option, but while it solved the data-availability problem, it did not solve the problem of having the management features available everywhere — nor did it make sharing straightforward. Calibre does not exist on smartphones or tablets, and I was not going to ask friends to set up a shared catalogue sync.

That is when Calibre-Web rode in on a white horse:

  • a minimalist, pleasant interface,
  • all the features I needed (sending e-books to Kindle, storing multiple formats, editing metadata, marking books as read, in-browser reading, an OPDS catalogue), and
  • straightforward installation on shared hosting.

My many devices were reduced to simple clients, and friends could browse my book catalogue without configuring anything on their end.

As for periodicals, I subscribed to print editions for a long time. Eventually I switched to digital versions, but the habit of reading on a physical medium — combined with getting a tablet — meant I was reading them as PDFs. Similarly, I mostly read online articles and blog posts on a computer screen. That is not particularly comfortable, to say nothing of eye strain after the first eight hours already spent staring at a monitor. There is also always more to read than there is time to read it, so a fair number of articles turned into zombie bookmarks. I was never a heavy reader of blogs and online magazines, so this was not an urgent problem.

Things changed when I decided to subscribe to Pulsar, a Polish science portal that, alongside its own content, publishes articles from Scientific American and Wiedza i Życie. Around the same time I renewed my Linux Magazine subscription, and in the latest issue I read about Readeck — a self-hostable read-it-later manager. Since all my subscriptions delivered articles as ordinary web pages and I was not interested in every piece they published, I decided to give Readeck a try. Like Calibre-Web, it was up and running on the same shared hosting in no time. Within under a minute I also had the Firefox extension installed and configured, letting me save articles directly to my new instance. Everything worked flawlessly.

Both books and articles now had dedicated, specialised applications to manage them, both self-hosted. Only one problem remained — the reading client itself. Sending books via “Send to Kindle” from Calibre-Web was a step forward, but it had drawbacks: it required another device to initiate the transfer, and it used Amazon’s infrastructure as an intermediary between the book source and the reader. The goal was a solution with no intermediary. The Kindle’s closed firmware, however, left no room for that — which meant it was time to jailbreak the device, and fortunately that turned out to be straightforward.

I use a Kindle PW4, which is not one of the newer models. Following the clear process described on the dedicated kindlemodding.org site, the device was free within about fifteen minutes. To give it the superpower of communicating directly with my services, I then installed KOReader — the most popular and mature alternative firmware for jailbroken e-readers (also available on other platforms). Installation was even simpler and went without a hitch. At that point the reader could communicate directly with the book manager via the OPDS catalogue exposed by Calibre-Web. All I had to do was log in to the service from the Kindle, and I could browse my catalogue and download books directly to the device.

Connecting Readeck to the Kindle required installing an additional plugin in KOReader. I then had to choose an authentication method; the most convenient one generated a QR code inside the plugin which, when scanned with a phone, opened a page where I simply confirmed the pairing. Notably, the Readeck plugin also syncs highlights and notes made while reading — something that is missing for books and requires a separate sync server to be configured (a task for another day).

Setting up the Calibre-Web — Readeck — KOReader trio is genuinely worth the effort. The benefits are:

  • Independence — no reliance on an external company and its whims (such as remotely deleting books from your device),
  • No surveillance — Kindle sends a large amount of metadata about your interactions with the device,
  • Convenience — your entire catalogue of books and articles accessible directly from the reader,
  • Healthier eyes.

And if none of those arguments are convincing enough, I will add one more: I got a small piece of dignity back. Being forced to use a device produced and managed by a multi-billion-dollar corporation entirely in English — a company that cannot be bothered to provide a localised interface — feels like a slap in the face. KOReader has a Polish interface and Polish characters on the keyboard.