Now that they’re so cheap, I’m sure that a lot of you have been debating whether or not to get an Amazon Kindle. The Kindle WiFi is 137 clams
and the Kindle 3G is only 189 clams.
From reading reviews about Kindles in the past, I was bummed out about the Amazonian data rights management and how you couldn’t read some of the more open formats. Luckily, Amazon chose to support some more formats, and the world changed to accommodate the Kindle. I finally took the plunge when I found out that the entire collection of the Gutenberg Project can be read on a Kindle. Here are the first things you should do after you get your Kindle.
One: Get Yourself Some Public Domain Horror at the Gutenberg Project
That’s right. Just about anything older than 90 years is in the public domain. This is a staggering amount of literature, and even if you’re not really into old books, there will be something there for you. The collection at the Gutenberg Project is available for the Kindle via the MOBI format. Here are some suggestions for places and authors you should check out:
Check out the The Horror Bookshelf page. Authors included here are Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Robert W. Chambers, John Meade Falkner, Paul H. C. Féval, William Hope Hodgson, Henry James, M. R. James (the best ghost stories, period), Franz Kafka, Sheridan Le Fanu (Carmilla), H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Charles Nodier, Elliott O’Donnell, Oliver Onions, Edgar Allan Poe, John William Polidori, Thomas Preskett Prest, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, George Sylvester Viereck.
Strangely, some great authors are missing from the above page. For example, Lafcadio Hearn (who translated Japanese Ghost Stories), Oscar Wilde (Picture of Dorian Gray and a lot of really amazing short stories), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), H.G. Wells, H.C. Andersen (fairy tales), and The Brothers Grimm. This isn’t EXACTLY in the horror genre, but if you’ve never read the Sir Richard Francis Burton translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (a.k.a. Arabian Nights), then you should go get it. NOW!
Here is another Gutenberg Project page on the topic of Horror.
You can use the on-board browser on the Kindle to browse the Gutenberg Project, but it’s a lot easier to download these on your computer and then copy them over to the Kindle via your USB connection. Now that you’ve got some great free horror literature, it’s time to make sure that you’re reading it in style.
Two: Jailbreak Your Kindle
This isn’t a big deal in and of itself (although obviously one should be careful so as to not brick their device). Jailbreaking a Kindle is something you do so that you can apply the Screensaver and Font hacks. Maybe there will be more hacks coming later, but for now those are the exciting ones. If you’re a real geek, there is also a way that you can network your Kindle over the USB connection and then use ssh with it. I’m not interested in that here. Instead, here are the instructions for Jailbreaking. It basically involves loading some files onto the Kindle over your USB connection and then rebooting it.
Three: Change the Typefaces
Now comes the first reward for having a jailbroken Kindle. You can install about any typeface you want. Go here for Kindle Font hack instructions. They don’t do a great job of describing how you can put your fonts into the Kindle. What you do is select the fonts you want, copy them into a folder, and rename them using the same naming scheme of the fonts in hack folder that is now installed on the Kindle. Then you copy them into that folder, over-writing the fonts there, and reboot.
Obviously, I went for a font that I find much more readable and pleasing to the eye. My favorite reading font happens to be the HPLHS-Old Style font from the HP Lovecraft Historical Society’s Prop Font Collection. These fonts are really cool. Some of them are free for personal use, but I recommend buying the whole collection because then you get the Metro family. It’s super-cheap for some great fun fonts. The photo above shows HPLHS Old Style for the text and Metro Black for the bolded text. If you’re looking for an alternate nice reading font, check out the Fell family that Igino Marini has revived.
Four: Hack the Screen Saver
When the Kindle goes to sleep, it displays various pre-installed pictures. Mostly these are of famous authors. Most of them are also pretty boring. Me, I go more for the likes of the Other Mother, Elsa Lanchester, Myrna Loy, and old movie posters. Here are instructions for how to do the screen saver hack.
Making the pictures for the screen saver is pretty easy. You need to resize and/or crop the photos to 600 x 800 pixels. To make pictures look nice on the Kindle screen, they really need to be high contrast. So it’s usually best to make the picture black and white and then adjust the contrast a lot. A LOT. Here are some I made to get you started: Frankenstein movie poster, Black Cat movie poster, Bride of Frankenstein Elsa Lanchester, Les Vampires Irma Vep, Myrna Loy, Nosferatu, Other Mother, and what I call “teeth chan.”
More Information
I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that there is a good alternate set of Kindle hacking instructions, here. If you have a new Kindle (Kindle 3) and want to change the fonts without hacking, there are instructions to do that here.
That’s it for my introduction to the Amazon Kindle for fans of Terror and the Supernatural. There’s always more coming out. I’ll update this as I find more.
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