Installing Amazon Kindle on Ubuntu linux

Note: this post is now outdated because of Amazon Cloud Reader, see below.

There have been quite a lot of posts about how to install Kindle on linux. A lot of them out of date that I've tried and given up. I thought I'd just give it a quick go on a new computer and it finally just worked. I did have one hurdle, using the latest wine 1.3. With the latest wine you can use the Kindle download from Amazon themselves, you don't need an old beta version.

Essentially, install wine 1.3 from http://www.winehq.org/download/ubuntu then run the download with:

This is not exactly what I did but I believe the above should work. What I did was first install wine from the default ubuntu repository, ran winecfg to change the default windows version to 98, then updated to wine 1.3 and ran the Kindle installer.

Update!!!!

Amazon recently released Kindle cloud reader which works really nicely so there's no need to mess around with wine any more!
https://read.amazon.com/about

Submitted by oliver on Wed, 27/04/2011 - 16:22

• oliver's blog
• 37400 reads