How to set up Kindle Scribe for reading Chinese

Kindles are no longer sold in Mainland China, but it is still surprisingly pleasant for reading Chinese (and CJK in general!).

This article will specifically target the Scribe, but it should also work on the latest other models.

Here’s the deal: the Kindle is definitely designed for a Latin-reading audience. It comes with a large selection of Latin fonts and no CJK fonts. Many Chinese books are not available on the e-bookstore. The latter is an easy fix; you can obtain Chinese ebooks however you like from other storefronts and load them onto the Kindle through Calibre or your preferred methods. However, the issue remains of font selection. By default, CJK characters are displayed, but switches weirdly between sans and serif (Song/Ming) glyphs. Also, if you don’t like the builtin system font, tough luck.

Luckily, the Kindle actually allows you to load custom fonts, a little-known feature. All you have to do is download the fonts onto your computer and drop them into the fonts/ directory in the Kindle filesystem.

Loading fonts

For Windows users: this is easy. Just plug in the Kindle and it should show up shortly in File Explorer.

For Linux users—not so easy. Older Kindles acted as USB Mass Storage devices, so they would show up as a USB Drive. The Scribe, and presumably other newer devices, use the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP). This means that lsblk or fdisk -l will not bring up the Scribe’s filesystem and you can’t just use mount(8) to access it, unlike what the top results on Google would suggest.

All you will need is a way to access an MTP filesystem. If you are using GNOME, this should require no action on your part. The gnome GVfs should support MTP out of the box, and you should be able to find it in Nautilus (also called “Files”). On my end, I’m running NixOS with Hyprland, but I have GVfs and Nautilus installed anyways, so that’s what I used.

Whichever way you chose to open the file system, simply peruse the Kindle’s files until you quickly find the fonts folder, then drop in your font of choice. I recommend the Noto CJK family, and the Song/Ming style. By the way, variable fonts are supported too!

To obtain Noto CJK, a free font developed by Google, you can grab it from the GitHub repository. Noto Serif CJK Simplified Chinese in particular can be found in this directory. Click the file “NotoSerifCJKsc-VF.otf” and then hit the “Download Raw” icon in the top right (it looks like an arrow pointing down into a bracket). (Note the other files are Noto Serif fonts for Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Hong Kong Traditional Chinese, which can be installed similarly.)

After downloading it, simply move the OTF file into the fonts/ directory on the Kindle, disconnect it from your computer, and then it will show up alongside the builtin fonts in the menu!