Your morning paper, printed on your Kindle.

Pick a time and Deckle builds the paper every morning. Plug the Kindle in and today’s edition goes straight over, or let it arrive over Wi-Fi by email through your own mail account. Only the newest three stay on the Kindle, so yesterday’s papers don’t pile up.

A Mac asleep at 5:30 builds the paper when it wakes. The paper always keeps its front page as the cover, on every Kindle. The Daily reference has every setting.

Find something worth reading during the day and save it: with the bookmarklet in your browser, by dropping the link into Deckle’s Inbox folder, or from your iPhone with a Shortcut that saves to iCloud Drive. It prints in tomorrow’s paper as Your Reading, whole and with its photos. A long piece becomes its own book and rides along with the paper.

A Kindle only loads X-Ray and Word Wise for books it files as store books, and it gives a store book it doesn’t recognise a grey cover. Personal documents keep their cover but get neither feature. Deckle reads each Kindle when it connects and makes the choice for that device:

Kindles that show as a USB drive

Features and the cover: Deckle writes its own cover thumbnail and restores it on every send.

Kindles that only speak MTP (Scribe 2024, Colorsoft, Paperwhite 2024)

The cover wins, unless the book matches a real Amazon edition. Then you can have both.

Exported to a folder

The cover wins.

Word documents, plain text, web articles and finished KFX files go through the same pipeline. Choose a library folder and Deckle keeps every book you send as plain folders, and the Kindle tab shows what is on the device and what Deckle can now build better.

A Kindle may itself ask Amazon about a book sent with features, because it carries an ASIN. That is the Kindle’s doing; sending as a personal document avoids it. A paper sent by email goes through Amazon, which typesets it its own way.

1. Install Kindle Previewer 4

   It is free from Amazon. Deckle drives it to typeset books and the paper, and never bundles it.

2. Download Deckle

   From the latest release. On a Mac, open the .dmg and drag Deckle to Applications; it is signed and notarized by Apple. On Windows, run the code-signed -setup.exe, which installs for your user with no admin. A new certificate can still bring up SmartScreen: choose More info, then Run anyway.

   From version 0.3.0 on, Deckle updates itself: the footer says when a new version is out, and Settings, About, Update installs it. Coming from 0.2.x, install the latest by hand once; on Windows, uninstall a 0.2.x .msi first.

3. Set up your paper, plug in your Kindle

   Name the paper and pick your town and feeds on the Daily tab, then turn on the morning schedule. For books, drop EPUBs on the window and press Send to Kindle. Close calibre and Android File Transfer first: only one program at a time can talk to an MTP Kindle.

Everything the app does, the command line does too:

deckle digest init
deckle digest run --to device
deckle digest schedule --at 05:30
deckle run book.epub --to device

Linux is unsupported: Kindle Previewer does the converting, and it only runs on Mac and Windows. To build from source you need Rust, Node 22 and pnpm; the README has the details.

Tomorrow’s paper, so far

The Daily tab opens on the next edition: a press bar with a countdown and a Stop the presses button, a live sketch of the front page that fills in as you save articles and your feeds post, a page plan you drag to reorder, and the week’s reads.

Local news for more places

Add a relative’s town or a vacation spot and each gets its own local section after yours. Weather stays on your place.

A puzzle page

A five by five mini crossword whose theme answers are yesterday’s headlines, a word ladder, and yesterday’s answers. Answer a clue as a Kindle note and the next paper tells you how many you solved.

Weather and almanac

A five-day strip, sunrise and sunset worked out on your Mac, the usual first frost for your place, the moon and the meteor shower of the night.

Your Day

Today’s events from your calendar files on the page, with a line when rain is likely during one.

Highlights out, and how far you read

Highlights and notes from the Kindle as Markdown, one file per book, in a folder you choose. And a local-only readout of which sections of the paper you actually reach.

Designed and waiting for code, each with a written plan:

• The Morgue: every edition kept, searchable, and sendable again
• One Mac, many papers: a separate paper for each Kindle in the house
• From Your Shelf: a page drawn from your own Kindle’s reading

Deckle stands on research and code from the MobileRead community: jhowell’s KFX Input and Output and kfxlib, of which Deckle’s KFX writer is a Rust port; jloutsch’s kfxgen; xxyzz’s WordDumb and Proficiency; seapy’s kindle-cli; and calibre’s Kindle driver. Word Wise definitions come from Wiktionary through kaikki.org, and word frequencies from wordfreq, both CC BY-SA 4.0. The paper’s weather comes from Open-Meteo and On this day from Wikipedia.

The demo paper on this page is fictional: Linden Falls and its stories were made up for it. Its photos are public domain. Kindle Previewer is Amazon’s and is never bundled. Kindle is a trademark of Amazon.com, Inc. Deckle is not affiliated with Amazon.