How to get newspapers or books onto your Kindle with Calibre

UPDATED: 05/01/2011

Many of you may have ebooks from other sources than Amazon or maybe you would like to have the contents of a blog or a newspaper on your Kindle, for example the Guardian is currently not available as a subscription on Amazon, you can however view it and the other aforementioned items on the Kindle with the help of Calibre.

• First of all if you don't have it, go and get Calibre now, it's free and it works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

• The interface itself isn't very intuitive but the program is incredibly powerful and can do a lot of things such as help you to organise your ebook collection, transfer ebooks to your ereader and also convert ebooks between formats. For now though I will just show you how to get the Guardian on your Kindle automatically each day.

• Install and launch Calibre (if you didn't already)

• If you go through the welcome wizard, then Calibre will ask you to fill in an email address, this will be used to send the newspapers or books to your Kindle, so make sure that you enter something here, if you missed this, then follow the step below. 

• Go into the preferences for Calibre (click on the Preferences icon) and scroll down until you find the "Sharing Books By Email" icon. Select this icon and then Fill in your email address. Alternatively, you can click on the "Run Welcome Wizard" and enter the email address as one of the steps and it will fill the rest for you automatically.

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• Next, go to the toolbar and click the red rosette type arrow
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• That will open a list of sources
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• Scroll down the list until you find English (UK) and click the little triangle to left to expand the options

• Now from the expanded list, scroll down until you see the The Guardian / The Observer (or whichever newspaper you want) and click it once to select it.

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• In the right-hand pane, set up a schedule that suits your needs, once done click Save. 

• NB: You have to leave or have your computer automatically turn on, before the time that you told Calibre to download the newspaper. If Calibre isn't running, then it cannot send the newspaper to your Kindle each day.

• Once done, if you scroll back to the top of the list on the left, you should now see a new row highlighted in green, that contains your active subscriptions, if you click the arrow next to it in order to expand the list, you can make any edits to the scheduling here.

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• Now the next thing that you need to do is go to Amazon.com and click on the Manage Your Kindle link, once there, scroll down until you find the section titled Your Kindle Approved Email List. 

• Here you need to add your personal email address to the approved list, as this is the email address that Calibre will be using in order to email the Newspapers to your Kindle and unless the address is added to the approved list the Kindle will not be able to accept it.

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• Once that's done you should now be able to receive content on your Kindle via Calibre. To test it, click the arrow next to red Fetch News icon and click Download All Scheduled News Sources.

• NB: Sometimes this can take more than a few minutes, so be patient!

• If you look in the bottom right of the Calibre window, you will see a heading that says Jobs with a number next to it, the number indicates the number of current tasks that Calibre is carrying out, if you click on it, it will display a new window showing you the progress. Once it's complete it will email the item to your Kindle and providing your email address is in the approved list on the Manage Your Kindle page, then the device will receive it.

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 Transferring Books

There are a couple of ways to transfer books to your device, one is to select the book in the Calibre window, right click on it and then choose Connect/Share > Email to and then select your Kindle email address in order to have the book emailed directly to the Kindle.

Another, is with your Kindle connect via USB, to select the book (or books), right click and then choose Send to Device > Send to Main Memory.

These are just a couple of ways to do it, hope you find it useful.

Update on Friday, May 13, 2011 at 5:53PM by Andrew Proudlove

Update:

Ive wrote up how to automatically send anything you download via Calibre to your Kindle afterwards via email. You can find that article here.

Comments

[Gaye]

Thanks! As a newbie, I appreciate it!

[Tammie]

Does sending newspapers via e-mail cost? Because I read that e-mailing can cost money :-/

I have a list of newspapers in Calibre but they haven't updated since I added them last weekend. What am I doing wrong?

[Andrew Proudlove]

Hi Tammie,
Sorry to get back to you so late, emailing newspapers to yourself shouldn't cost money if you use the <youremailaddress>@free.kindle.com

As for your second question, have you set up a schedule for them, e.g. daily and a time? I think if you don't manually specify it, they only update if you manually do it by clicking the down arrow on the red rosetta like icon.

Hope this helps,

Andrew

[Bob Epton]

Great article Andrew. Thanks for taking the time to write this. I'm able to download the Guardian as scheduled but it's not automatically emailing it to my Kindle. Could you talk me through what needs doing please? Bob

[Tammie]

Thanks Andrew, sorry for delay!

I don't open Calibre that often so that might not help in updating :) I forget... I'm not purchasing any eBooks right now due to lack of funds so am only reading what's on my Kindle and not connecting to my PC.

:)

[Andrew Proudlove]

@Bob - I've just made a note to do a write-up on this. I'll post a separate article with steps etc, kids allowing, within the next couple of days.

@Tammie - I know the feeling well, I'm also working through the stuff on the Kindle too but I'm keeping an eye on the free books on Amazon and some samples, just in case ;)