Jailbroke my old Kindle, and disabled updates. It’s way better now. With the custom reader, I can just connect it straight to Calibre and copy books over via WiFi with no bother. Disabled ads and have custom screensavers too.
If anyone has an old Kindle, and is upset about this, I’d suggest to have a look to see if yours can be jailbroken.
How old does the kindle need to be?
According to this page, you can jailbreak Kindles going all the way back to the first generation. The older you go the less features may be available to you, however definitely have a look at your model number there.\
There seems to be a firmware version that is incompatible, however that page should provide some more information about it.
Good thing I bought mine, never connected it to the internet, and only added my own books to it manually with calibre. This won’t effect me one but. Fuck Amazon.
I suspect the real reason is those older Kindles allowed to remove the DRM from any media loaded onto them via Amazon. Because the decryption key is the serial number written on the back of the device.
If those devices are not supported anymore, they don’t need to issue these easily breakable DRM protected ebooks anymore.
My apology if someone else wrote this before, or it’s been mentioned somewhere already. Didn’t read everything so far.
Interesting, I didn’t know that!
Amazon is “discontinuing support for Kindle devices released in 2012 or earlier”
And here’s my Sony PRS-505 from 2008 - released four years earlier - it still works fine, can read .epub and .pdf, is extendable to 32GB capacity by two memory cards and moddable with a custom Linux distribution (PRS Plus).
It also doesn’t have WiFi, so no one can remotely delete 1984 from your library. Fuck you, Amazon.
Since it’s Sony I have to ask: are the memory cards normal standard ones or some proprietary discontinued Sony crap?
There is one SD card slot and one MemoryStick slot.
I did not know this thing existed lol. I have an older Kindle, not sure when I got it but it’s gotta be close to 10 years old. I didn’t read the article yet but it still works as far as I’m aware. I primarily use it for loading PDFs and epubs and the like.
Hey fellow 505 owner! It really is the best damn e-reader I could imagine, I bought mine back in 2009 and it is still perfect… Well except the case, it’s been peeling and looking rough for a good decade now.
Interestingly 1984 was the first book I read on it, but I agree, Fuck Amazon!
I tried finding a good case, but all of them are just rotten at this point. I even got the one with the integrated nightlight and it turned into literal dust in my hands.
At this point I am honestly considering making my own, out of some leather. It can’t be that difficult, can it? :D
I’m just thinking out loud but maybe a sleeve would be easier to DIY and then the reader would feel lighter in your hands without a case.
Absolutely jealous of that, I have a touchpad one but yours is antique beauty
I absolutely love this thing. It’s a solid block of metal and will probably live longer than me. It chokes on ePubs with embedded fonts sometimes (64MB of memory is not a lot), but with Calibre you can strip them out and then they all work fine.
Yes! I have (or rather now my child has) a very old Sony e-reader, a different but equally clunky one. It still works fine, the display is just as good as my kindle device minus the backlight and even the battery is still OK and lasts for several days of activity. And for a while now, I use my kindle the same way as the Sony, buying my content elsewhere and just transferring it to the reader.
Anyone who takes them up on their offer to buy a new Kindle should check themselves in for a mental health screening.
They just told all of their customers that you cannot trust a device you buy from them will continue to work in the future. So buy one from a different manufacturer and hope they aren’t as evil
I get that it may be expensive to perpetually support old devices but there is surely a middle ground between supporting them and bricking them.
Even if you have a large library on kindle I hope you have the ‘calibre’ to move devices.
Back in about 2010-ish? One of the first “amazon deletes your book remotely” events happened. They removed a Kindle version of 1984 from people’s readers.
I don’t know how much irony fits into an irony singularity, but Amazon is trying to make the most irony ever.
I used to have a kindle and it would periodically lock up and I’d have to do a hard reset and then re-download all my books. It was extremely frustrating. I finally got tired of it and ditched ti for a Kobo Clara. Whats nice about the Kobo is that it doesn’t have all the janky DRM bullshit, and it just works. You can load up books or pdfs from any source. So much happier now!
I mean to be fair I’ve had three Kindles now and am someone who uses old Fairphones and repairs them, and none of my Kindles gotten close to surviving long enough to potentially run into this problem of them no longer supporting it.
Which… is the actual reason one should not get a Kindle, tbh. They’re fragile as fuck.
I wanted to migrate away from Kindle anyway.
Thanks for pushing me a little bit further in that direction, Amazon!Can’t have been that devoted if they were still on those old devices instead of buying the newest one every 1~2 years, can they now?! <-- Amazon C-suites
As Reg readers know, nothing in tech lasts forever
lol. I’m using a 2016 Samsung Galaxy Tab as my e-reader. I fully expect the pirated epub files I use on it to be readable until I am dead. It is never connected to the Internet, never updated, never anything except a USB connection to move over more books.
For context if it matters: I have purchased every book on it in physical form. I download epubs of these books so I can carry my library with me anywhere I go and I feel no guilt about this whatsoever - largely because of BULLSHIT like this article.
I understand not being able to support newer eBook formats or certain content on older devices; standards change, as do the capabilities of devices (resolution, storage, etc.) and that makes sense. But unless I’m missing something major, there shouldn’t be any issue with them allowing users to keep accessing their account and purchase already-compatible eBooks for these older devices. Basically bricking it if you de-register or factory reset is absurd.
Amazon eBook formats have DRM that encrypts it to you and your Kindle’s unique device ID and they can just stop reissuing, or revoke the decryption keys. They make it extraordinarily difficult to export/download them in a DRM-free format that would otherwise be unaffected.
They can deny access, sure, but they should allow access to something you’ve already paid for (both the Kindle and the ebook).
Or at the very least pay it back.
I suspect they’re ending support for some older format these devices need on their server-system, since it’s been a few years.
But sadly no technical details given.
That would likely be .mobi, which had been deprecated for years. In fact, when I had an Oasis years ago, and I emailed it books I had downloaded, it would refuse them unless they were .epub format.
(Yes, you read that right. Each Kindle has an email address where you can mail your books bought elsewhere.)
I imagine that after several years post .mobi, they are finally done providing that format for older kindles that don’t support .epub. It sucks for the people who use the old Kindles, but all e-readers these days, Amazon made or otherwise, prefer .epub as well, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t continue to support an old format indefinitely.
