Reading the internet without the internet: Web articles on a Kindle
I’ve spent a lot of time on the internet, and really wish I didn’t. I quite regret not spending my time with friends outside of school or getting into some kinda art form. Reducing internet usage has been a small goal of mine, and have resulted in successfully reduced my social media usage to basically never interacting with it and rarely viewing it much.
But there’s the two things I can spend a lot of time on, and that is reading articles and especially watching YouTube videos. So far I don’t have a (realistic) solution for YouTube, but I have a cool one for articles.
About a year ago a Kindle was handed to me and have been using it occasionally after jailbreaking it and adding Koreader, reading books here and there, but I wanted to get more use out of it, and so began to utilize a feature that’s built into Calibre, the ebook management software.
Inside Calibre are “Recipes”, basically Python scripts that under a certain time frame, whether that be days or weeks, scrape and reformat webpages that are then combined into a Kindle friendly formatted ebook, ad free. It’s pretty tricky to make your own, especially without much Python skills, but the ones built in have a decent selection, at least in english. You’ll also want to turn on the ‘Content Server’ to sync through networking so that you don’t have to quit out of Koreader and plug in the Kindle through USB.
Because you don’t have the massive array of distractions right at your finger tips, there’s more time to focus on the content of the articles and get invested into it. It’s easy to click off or pay not much attention to the page if you know that they’ll be a bunch more stuff to look at afterwards, this setup can potentially reduce the endless scrolling through dozens of websites and hundreds of user comments.
One obstacle I’ve been trying to figure out is converting just individual pages I stumble upon that I’ll want to read later, especially on my phone. Calibre doesn’t have a feature like that; my hacky and slow way of doing it is to convert the site link to text with something like textise, then save it as a text file and use an app called Epub Converter to convert it to an ebook and email it to the Kindle. This obviously isn’t the best solution for how awfully slow it is, how janky the Epub Converter app is, and that Koreader can’t read files that have been emailed to the Kindle. An Android app that slim lines this process to one app and has the feature to share a webpage link to the app or batch convert a file of links to one book would be quite amazing. I’ve been wanting to test if using an FTP server app on my phone will work but I haven’t gotten around to it.
There’s a lot of improvement on this setup, but the building blocks are there to make a neat setup that let’s you view the internet without interacting with it much if at all. If you got an ereader laying around in a drawer, give this a shot, or just read more books in general, maybe it’s something you were needing.