Saturday, April 09, 2011

Kindlefish - Update for K1/K2/DX Users

I just wanted to give an update on what's going on with Kindlefish and to clarify the situation for users of the Kindle 1, 2, and DX models. I've had some great help from Charlie Wallace of Encinitas, CA with getting Kindlefish to working on the K1, and recently my friend loaned me his DX Graphite to get to the bottom of what can be done for previous generations of the Kindle. Combined, it's given a clear picture about what's going on.

For users of the Kindle 3G, you can ignore this post. Kindlefish works for you. If you can see the site, you can translate! If you can't, it's a temporary outage of the website and not an issue with your device. :)

For users of the K1, K2, and DX, Kindlefish works for you two, but with one caveat: There is no support for languages that use non-Latin characters, like Japanese, Greek, or Russian, among others. Unfortunately, this is a limitation of the Kindle itself. ごめんなさい! I will keep an eye out for a solution, but the tools that would be able to solve aren't available through an API to the public from Google yet. If I see a work around, I'll put it in there. In the mean time, I've finished up a Kindlefish version just for you guys. It's available here.

A more permanent fix that you can do yourself is to jailbreak your kindle and install the expanded font support that Amazon left out (plus you'll get the ability to set custom screen savers!). The MobileRead Wiki has the details on how to do this, and there's another nice write up over here at howtogeek, but as with all unofficial modifications this comes with a disclaimer. Font and screen saver hacks seem to be very safe and easily reversible, but the usb networking hack comes with a more strongly worded warning. While these hacks should be safe, please do your research before hand!


Kindlefish has been tested and works on the Kindle 1 (B001), the Kindle DX Graphite (B009), and Kindle 3G (B006). 

Asian languages are unfortunately not supported by the device itself

Kindlefish ought to work on the Kindle 2 (B002, B003), Kindle DX (B004, B005), and the rest of the Kindle 3 family (B008, B00A) as well, but has not been verified. If you own one of these devices and can test it, please let me know by filling out this brief survey here so I can update this list.

1 comment:

  1. I wanted to download the kindlefish version to be able to translate full sentences to polish in my kindle but when I click on the link "it's available here" the link does not work, or is no longer available... Is it still possible to download this app? How can I download the kindlefish or google translate to my kindle or how do I access it on my kindle?

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