Deckle prints a real morning newspaper on your Kindle, built on your own computer from your town’s news and weather and the reading you saved, and turns the books you own into Kindle books that read like the store’s.
A demo edition: Linden Falls and its stories are fictional. Photos are public domain.
Deckle is a free, open-source desktop app for the Kindle. Every morning it sets a real newspaper on your own computer, from your town’s news and weather, your feeds and the articles you saved, and puts it on the Kindle. It also turns the EPUBs you own into Kindle books that read like ones from the store. It runs on macOS and Windows.
Books you load onto a Kindle yourself are second-class. They miss Enhanced Typesetting, lose their covers, and get no page numbers, X-Ray or Word Wise. Every fix exists somewhere as a calibre plugin or a forum recipe, each with its own install story, and they fight each other: the one that gives you X-Ray takes away your cover on a 2024 Kindle Scribe. Deckle is one tool that does all of it, and picks the trade-off for each Kindle instead of leaving it to you.
Every source sits behind one small network interface and is gathered on its own, so a feed that is down becomes an “unavailable today” line in its section and the edition still builds, even with no network at all. The front page is drawn in Rust with bundled open-licence fonts and becomes the EPUB’s cover, and the paper is always sent as a personal document so that cover shows on every Kindle.
Kindle Previewer produces a KPF: a zip around a SQLite database of Ion fragments. A Kindle wants a single monolithic KFX. jhowell’s kfxlib has the complete path between them; Deckle’s KFX writer is a Rust port of it, tested byte for byte against kfxlib’s own output, so no Python ships with the app.
X-Ray and Word Wise only load for books marked EBOK with an ASIN, and an EBOK the store doesn’t know shows a grey cover once the Kindle goes online. So Deckle reads each Kindle: where system/thumbnails is writable it sends EBOK and restores its own thumbnail on every send; on MTP-only Kindles it sends PDOC, so the cover wins, unless the book matched a real Amazon edition.
The 2024 Scribe, Colorsoft and Paperwhite only speak MTP, and macOS has none. Deckle carries a small PTP/MTP client over USB that always uses the 32-bit ObjectInfo layout, because libmtp’s layout switch makes every write to a Kindle fail with 0xA806.
A Word Wise sidecar holds no text, only positions and sense ids into a dictionary already on the Kindle. Deckle matches each book against its own Wiktionary-derived lexicon of 174,000 senses, with every inflection mapped to its lemma, and detects proper nouns per book so that "Darcy" is never glossed as a unit of permeability.
Every feature starts as a design document in the repository, and the pipeline is tested against fixtures and a simulated Kindle disk image before it touches a real device. What has been verified on real Kindles is recorded model by model in docs/devices.md.
The Kindle tab: what is on the device, and what Deckle can now build better.
Deckle is free and open source. It needs Amazon’s free Kindle Previewer 4 to convert books.