# Putting Manadarin books on Kindle - Please Help!!!!!!!



## kitti2katz2 (Aug 4, 2011)

Hi, I bought a kindle to give to my grandfather as a gift but am totally confused as to what to do now. He is not very technologically savvy so I am hoping to load some books onto it before I give it to him, but the problem is I have absolutely no idea how to do this. The books need to be in Mandarin, and since the only Chinese-language books available from the Amazon Kindle store appear to be manga-type romance cartoons (which is not the type of content I think my grandpa wants to read!) http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&rh=n%3A3151571%2Cp_n_feature_browse-bin%3A618073011&page=1, I am guessing I will have to download the books from somewhere else. I read in another thread that http://haodoo.net/ is a website where you can download Chinese kindle books from, but the site is entirely in Chinese which I do not understand at all. I know that there must be some sort of way to translate the website but I don't know how - anyone have any ideas?

If I ever even figure out where/how to download some Chinese books, I am then really confused about how to actually get them onto the Kindle. From what I read in the other threads, the files need to be emailed to the kindle and not uploaded through a USB so that the characters don't show up as squares (??) I don't have a Kindle of my own so this is my first time ever trying to use one and I am really just so confused. I am embarrassed to admit that while my grandfather is in 80s and not that great with computers, I am in my 20s and probably not that much better! If anyone knows how to download Chinese books and upload them onto the Kindle and could explain in simple, dumb-ed down terms I (and my grandfather) would appreciate it so much! We're going on vacation on Saturday and I was really hoping to be able to give it to him then!


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## SusanCassidy (Nov 9, 2008)

If the books were created correctly, you can certainly copy them via USB.  The email conversion service is only necessary if you need to convert from html, Word, etc. to Kindle format.

Display of squares instead of characters means that a difference of encoding has made the characters invalid, or that the document did not declare its encoding correctly.  That means that there are many ways to encode characters of various languages into digital file, but it has to be done correctly, and in an encoding that the Kindle understands (UTF-8, for languages like Chinese).


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## Morf (Nov 18, 2010)

kitti2katz2 said:


> I read in another thread that http://haodoo.net/ is a website where you can download Chinese kindle books from, but the site is entirely in Chinese which I do not understand at all. I know that there must be some sort of way to translate the website but I don't know how - anyone have any ideas?


Try this:

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fhaodoo.net%2F

It then makes a little sense, at least!


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## Morf (Nov 18, 2010)

OK, played a little further with this. It's a little complicated, so stick with me.

You're lucky, actually, I usually leave the computer by now (9:30PM in the UK) and sit down to read my Kindle, but my cat Pixel has curled up in my reading chair and gone to sleep, so I'm still here.










Ok, and because his brother Comet will complain if he doesn't get his picture here as well...










Anyway, where was I?... 

Start off by opening two browser windows, one to the haodoo site in Chinese and one to the Google translated version from the link I gave.

In the translated version, look for a book you want to download. If you click on the book, you'll get a description of it - good luck with the translated Chinese, but it's better than nothing. 

Now what you'd normally do here is to pick one of the buttons, to download the book. For the Kindle, you want the prc version.

However, for me at least, when I do that from the google translated page it doesn't work. If you have the same problem, then what you need to do is to go to the browser window with the untranslated site, and pick the same link, then click the prc button which should download the book to your PC (You'll get a popup window first, I've no idea what it says, I just picked OK).

Now, plug the Kindle into your PC using USB, at which point it should appear as an additional drive on your PC. Copy the .prc file you've just downloaded to the documents folder on your Kindle.

When you've copied all you want, right click on the Kindle and pick "Eject". Your Kindle should come back to life (if it doesn't, disconnect the cable) and after a moment you should have the Chinese books on your Kindle.

I've just tried all this, and I now have two Chinese books on my Kindle (I tried emailing one, that worked fine as well).

Now all I need to do is to learn Chinese!  

BTW, Pixel is still there, still fast asleep, so no reading for me tonight!


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