This project is a port of Cool Reader application (by Vadim Lopatin AKA Buggins) to Kindle. It supports epub (non-DRM), fb2, doc, txt, rtf, html, chm, tcr, pdb, prc, mobi (non-DRM), pml formats.
The port was originally created by Andy Wooden, fau and VladKi, the project had no fixed home and its sources were distributed as tarballs, making it hard to maintain and provide updates. This site is the new project home.
The fronentd is Qt based (QWS) and has custom display and keyboard drivers. Up until October 2012 there was no good working graphics driver available for Kindle 4 (2011 and 2012 models), this caused a problem with poor eink contrast display. Finally, Andy Wooden has found some time to make it work properly on Kindle 4, he contacted me with the updated driver source that I compiled and released with the new Cool Reader distribution on various forums.
Another goal of this project is to make it easier to install on new Kindle devices. As K4 has no keyboard, there is no hack like launchpad for it. However, it's possible to run Kindlets (these are small apps written in Java, almost like the old Java Applets). cr3runner by Victor Pyankov provides an easy way to run custom applications and scripts on Kindle 4 devices. Kindlets are signed with developer keys that need to be available on your device, it makes the installation process pretty hard (2 system files need to be replaced manually).
KindleTool project allows to package custom files and scripts to be run on jailbroken devices from the standard Kindle Update menu. Some users were providing cr3runner installer, but it was old, crashed often and didn't install on Kindle 4 2012 (black) model. I changed it a bit to provide better user experience (no menu when there is only one command, Cool Reader name in the documents list, updated installer that runs on all K4 models).
So, here you have the latest Qt drivers providing perfect contrast on K4, most recent Cool Reader 3 Qt port for Kindle based on the git crengine sources, updated cr3runner to easily run it on your device and packaged into Kindle update with the help of KindleTool for easier installation. No need to research and google, everything is in one place!
Feel free to fork and send me pull requests/patches.
- Installation instructions (eng)
- Installation instructions (rus)
- Jailbreak your Kindle
- Copy update_cr3runner_n.n_install-k4.bin from cr3runner.zip to Kindle flash root
- Copy all directories from cr3-kindle-nnnn-nn-nn.zip available in Downloads to Kindle flash root
- (optional, but recommended) Download the latest test version as the repository snapshot zip and copy all the files from the dist folder replacing all existing files on the connected Kindle (this way you update to the most recent version with all the latest changes)
- From the Kindle Settings dialog open menu, run Update Your Kindle
- After reboot you should have Cool Reader in the documents list, open it.
Kindle 3/DX owners can also use launchpad.
- Russian discussion thread on the-ebook.org forum
- English discussion thread on mobileread.com forum
