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How to go Amazon free on your Kindle

A few days ago I came across Duokan, an open source firmware for the Amazon Kindle (2/3/DX). It’s being developed by a group of Chinese developers and while it’s still in beta, unfortunately, it’s gotten good enough that you might want to try it.

BTW, Duokan doesn’t replace the existing Kindle firmware, so you won’t have to worry about breaking your Kindle.

Right now Wifi isn’t working (for me), and I’m not sure they plan to hack the 3G connection. But you can read Epub, Mobi, PDF, and txt, and you can highlight and bookmark. I haven’t tested it yet, but you also have the option of TTS (it’s probably Chinese only at the moment). There’s also a music player and what appears to be an RSS Reader.

I’m going to pass, myself. Yes, I’d love to be able to read Epub, but Duokan currently supports only full justification and I much prefer to have left justification only. Also, I’d really prefer to have Wifi.  And to be perfectly honest, if I wanted an ereader that supported Epub I’d get an ereader that supported Epub.

You can download a copy of Duokan here. Pay close attention to the instructions on how to switch the interface from Chinese to English.

Doukan via lesen.net

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Duokan Raises $10 Million in First Round of Financing – The Digital Reader May 14, 2012 um 2:49 pm

[…] in the year. It looks to now also be available for the K4 and Kindle Touch.I tried Duokan back in late 2010. It was the Lite version, and since it ran from files copied to the Flash storage, it didn’t […]


Lamont Cranston August 9, 2012 um 1:06 am

I’ve been playing with it on my K4 NT.
Since the above article was written, they now have a (mostly) English version, WiFi is working and the install is pretty straightforward. It also asked for permission before upgrading the firmware (a big improvement over Kindle OS updating without asking the owner)
The main reason for Duokan, IMHO is that a DRM’d Epub can’t be converted by Calibre (as per Calibre’s own help files). Duokan can display Mobi and Epub
Kindle features I miss, and would like to see migrated:
It would be nice if they had a 'rotate screen' option.
list mobi files by the title in the metadata instead of the file name (since all my Project Gutenberg files are named PG and a number, instead of the book name. Kindle OS gets this right)
Duokan features I like:
Reading Stats; tracking your reading speed, length of reading sessions and other metrics – just geeky fun. And a related feature- hands free timed page turning; nice for reading on the treadmill .
It is very nice to see 'Uninstall' as a menu choice, very polite 🙂
The "collections" are straightforward directories, and you can have nested directories.
What I’d like to see:
SSH over WiFi (with root access)
the ability to add URLs to the 'get ebooks' list


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