Wednesday, May 09, 2012

Want to Kindle the MSDN Magazine? Here's a suggestion how...

Liam Westley - MSDN Magazine on your Kindle

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Here in the UK we never received the print version of MSDN Magazine even as an MSDN Enterprise/Universal subscriber, so we relied on the compiled help file (CHM) version for offline reading. Recently this changed to PDF, which works on a Kindle, but isn’t the ideal format for the small screen and the PDF does take quite a while to appear on the MSDN site (currently April and May are not available).

Coming the rescue is the the free and open source, eBook tool, Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/). I first discovered this application when I wished to download the Economist newspaper to my Kindle. Calibre includes a ‘Fetch News’ ability, which allows scheduled downloading of web site content, with ‘recipes’ that convert those screen scrapes into various formats including MOBI, EPUB or PDF. It even will update your Kindle over USB, loading any new titles into your documents folder.

One of the recipes available is for the MSDN magazine. So the moment a new version appears on the MSDN web site, (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/default.aspx), you can just fire up Calibre and download the latest version to your Kindle. If you run Calibre on startup you can even schedule the MSDN magazine to be collected every month and automatically downloaded to your Kindle.

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I need to check this out as I love me my kindle... The only thing I see that I'd want to look into more is if Calibre can use the Send To Kindle app (and if not, I don't think it would be to hard to hack that... ). Still this is cool and something I hadn't known about (I heard of Calibre but not the recipes thing).

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