Got an Old Kindle? It Might Not Work Anymore

It seems absurd to me that Amazon is making the product decision to EOL functional hardware that is _actively used to purchase books from them, legally_... all to... what? potentially sell another $100 or so reader? At the expense of... what? Some minimal amount of engineering effort to keep updates flowing for the extremely limited surface area that is the old Kindle OS?

Why upset your customers over this when they were otherwise using this device to give you money?

Best thing I ever did with my Kindle was jailbreak it and install KOReader. Crazy that somebody needs to do that in order to truly own their device.

I transfer books by running `python -m http.server` on my phone or computer, then opening my Kindle’s browser to my IP and downloading my .mobi book. It doesn’t take long, and I can do it all over Wi-Fi.

I can mount it via SSHFS for anything more than copying a single book.

I stopped buying anything from Amazon on principal a couple years ago, books included; and anyway, most books I read these days are in the public domain – Project Gutenberg is a treasure trove!

I just jailbroke my old Kindle 4 for fun. Found out of it ever connects to WiFi it unjailbrakes itself. :)

The email Amazon sent out said that if you factory reset your device after May 20 it becomes inoperable. I wonder if that means bricked, or if it just means you can't access your DRM kindle library.

As much as I am a fan of annas-archive, Zlibrary Koreader Plugin[1] makes a bargain I can't refuse.

[1] https://github.com/ZlibraryKO/zlibrary.koplugin

They said that it affected less than 3% of Kindle e-readers and Kindle Fire tablets. I wonder how that number would change if they only considered Kindle e-readers? I suspect that the disposability of tablets distorts that number significantly.

> If you own one of the affected Kindles, you’ll still be able to access all of the books that are already downloaded to your device. However, you’ll no longer be able to purchase, borrow, or download books to your device from the Kindle Store.

> And while you can sideload DRM-free (digital rights management–free) titles to the Kindle via USB [...], it’s not the best option from a security standpoint.

What a terrible article.

Two week old story;

Some disucssion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47678320

you can still transfer over usb, which should be the bare minimum for eol hardware support... this isn't as bad as it seems on the surface