Best Amazon Kindles are reliably good at their primary function: displaying e-books in a beautiful, easy-to-view format. But Kindle e-readers It’s actually more powerful than you might think.
If you’ve just upgraded to a new Kindle and are looking for something to do with your old one, or if you just want to see how these e-readers can be hacked, we’ve got three projects for you to try.
These projects vary in difficulty and the time and effort you’ll have to invest, but complete instructions for all of them are available online, so you can follow the steps on your own Kindle.
Turn Your Kindle Into a Spotify Controller
Part of the appeal of Spotify is that it can work on many different devices and connect to many other services. There are many ways to use Spotify, and that includes through your Kindle. All you need to do is provide your Spotify ID, and then make sure your Kindle is on the same Wi-Fi network as the other device you use to play your music, podcasts, or audiobooks.
This is possible through Kindlify.co. Open the website in the built-in Kindle browser, then tap Connect Spotify to enter When that’s done, you should see details of whatever you’re currently playing on Spotify—though you’ll need to use another device to select something from your library. There is more discussion about this hack Redditwhere I got it.
It all works through the magic of Spotify Connectwhich you may have already encountered. This feature lets you play something on your laptop and then control playback from your phone, for example, or vice versa. You can also use the feature to control playback through compatible smart speakers.
Note that you don’t actually store any music on your Kindle or run the official Spotify app. This hack is just a way to connect to your Spotify account and control whatever is playing through it, right from your Kindle. You can skip forward and backward, and pause and resume playback, all from the web browser.
Turn Your Kindle Into a Smart Home Display
Another way to reuse the Kindle and its E-Ink screen is to turn it into a smart display that pulls all kinds of data from other services. You can use the e-reader to display a variety of information related to your devices, including the weather forecast, calendar information, and your to-do lists.
This is by far the most involved of the projects featured here, and you need to do everything from setting up a custom website to cutting a custom-made frame for your Kindle. Developer Matt Healy, who originally put this all together, is hard at work gave orders online.
It’s the kind of project you can try if you want to learn more about hardware hacking, coding, the inner workings of Kindles, and how different apps and services talk to each other. By the time you’re done, you might have some ideas for hacks like yours that you can try.
The information you display is entirely up to you, but will need to come from systems that allow third-party connections. You can see from the documents provided by Matt Healy that he has been able to get real-time information from weather services, calendars, and even reports of future shipping conditions.
Turn Your Kindle Into a Literary Clock
Finally, you can also consider turning your Kindle into a literary watch. This hack keeps the e-book theme but returns the device to a display you can look at whenever you want to know what time it is, with each minute represented by a different quote from the book that tells the time.
As with any smart home display, this requires a significant amount of work in terms of coding and setting everything up, but again, there complete instructions onlineso you can deal with it yourself. You can make a stand or watch frame, but it’s not necessary if you don’t care about the original look of the e-reader.
