Daily Scripture Delivered to Your Kindle

MLH reader Jake Nielson sent us the following step-by-step hack to get a scripture delivered to your Kindle daily. It’s a bit technical in that you have to setup a dedicated Blogger blog, just get an RSS feed that can be sent to your Kindle, but its a great way to make it work, and the ideas could help you accomplish other hacks.

1. 

   Install Calibre

2. Run through the Calibre setup wizard and input your personal email address, so Calibre can use it to send documents to your Kindle email. Calibre integrates best with Gmail but most email accounts should work.
3. Next pair Calibre with your Kindle by inputting your kindle email address into Calibre (use [user]@kindle.com or [user]@free.kindle.com if you have a Kindle 3.
4. Calibre will send the daily scripture study reading to that address so you can read it on your Kindle. If you didn’t do this in the welcome wizard, you can always go to the settings/preferences and under “Sharing Books by Email” and add the information there.

5. 

   Setup a new blogger blog just for this, with “publish by email immediately” turned on.

   

6. Create an account with ReadTheScriptures.com (similar to previously mentioned SendMeScripture.com, which will probably also work) using the email address from blogger publish by email.
7. Set your preferred reading schedules in www.readthescriptures.com
8. Send a reading from ReadTheScriptures.com to Blogger and double check the new blog to make sure it automatically posted.

9. 

   Setup that blog’s RSS in Calibre as a “Custom News Source” under “Fetch News” > “Add a Custom News Source” by entering your blog’s RSS feed into the software. Once you’ve done that, click “Add Feed” then click “Add/Update Recipe”

10. Now you need to set Calibre to send the blog posts on a daily basis to your Kindle. To do that, go to “Fetch News” > “Schedule News Download.” Select the “Custom News Sources” drop down then select your “Daily Scripture Study” feed and set it to schedule for download every day at 3am (or any time after midnight).

11. 

    Run a test by selecting “Download all scheduled news sources” and watch it deliver to your Kindle.

12. Put in a request to ReadTheScriptures.com and/or SendMeScripture.com to create individual RSS feeds for each account, so you can cut Blogger out of this whole process and make it a lot simpler.

Notes on this process:

• When reading the scripture entries on your kindle, once you get to the end of the selection, click on the “Completed” link. This tells www.readthescriptures.com that you’ve read the selection and are ready to receive a new one on the next day. Thanks to the Kindle’s web browser, you will be able to do this with no problems.
• I realize it would also be much simpler if one could just use the Kindle email address to setup the ReadTheScriptures.com account but the only problem with that is the way that Kindle receives emails. It only receives attachments and not actual email text. Hence, this setup is a workaround to make it happen.
• Also note that in order for Calibre to send the scriptures every morning it must be running. For me this was easy because I just set it up on my desktop and keep the program running in the background. If you use a laptop, it will still work but it will only be able to download/send when the laptop is on.

Let us know if this works for you in the comments below, or if you have a great life hack of your own, use the contact form in the sidebar to send it to us.