Amazon has told owners it will soon stop supporting older Kindle models - a move which has left some users outraged.
In emails from the tech giant, affected users were thanked for being a “longtime Kindle customer” but told devices released during or before 2012 would no longer receive updates from 20 May.
The move will mean owners of older Kindles, including its earliest models such as the Kindle Touch and some Kindle Fire tablets, will be unable to download new e-books.
Amazon said it has supported affected models for years and their active users have been offered discounts to help “transition to newer devices”, but some have criticised it for making up to two million devices “obsolete”.
“I have a Kindle Touch that I’ve had since 2013, it works great, I bought a book on it a few months ago, and suddenly it’s obsolete,” one X user wrote in a post tagging Amazon.
Older kindles can and should be jailbroken.
Removing DRM is likely completely legal.
* is definitely legal in most of the world
That said, if anyone has better suggestions for a reader that doesn’t involve giving money to a shitty company like Amazon, this would be a great place to post them!
I have a Kobo Clara 2E and like it very much.
I have the Libra 2 and love it. Nice thumb rail with page-turning buttons. Doesn’t need jailbreaking to install KOReader or do whatever else I want.
I love my Kobo Libra Color. I got it to replace my Kindle Oasis, and it has the same basic form factor. I wanted the KLC because I read a lot of manga and webcomics, and can sync them directly from my Calibre server.
My only real complaint is the lack of expandability. 32GB is fine for ebooks, because text takes basically no storage space. But comics (basically images organized together in a zip archive) and audiobooks quickly eat that storage space. If it included a microSD slot, that would greatly expand how long I can go between syncs. For a device that released in 2024, only including 32GB of on-board storage is an interesting choice.
My only guess is that it doesn’t have an SD card slot because it is IPX8 rated. I know it’s technically possible to IP rate an SD card slot, but I have no idea how easy it is. Older (black and white) Libra models used an internal SD card reader. You could crack the case open with a few screws and upgrade the storage very easily. But the Libra Color uses soldered eMMC, so upgrading the storage is a no-go.
Not legal in Germany. But who cares
Reiß dich mal zusammen, Deutschland.
I recently got a Boox Go Color and really enjoy it. The nice thing is that it runs Android so can benefit from the app ecosystem.
Pocketbook makes nice e readers too! Issue then is mostly with getting books, especially non-drm ones
Kobo seems.to always get good reviews
It would probably take a lot of work to make like a wizard for low tech people to use for jailbreaking, right? A relative has brain damage and used to be tech savvy but now gets uneasy about things like that. I could jailbreak it for her, specifically, but I keep thinking about people in her situation who were early adopters of ebooks and would love to keep using the same device but can’t do steps like that anymore.
Sorry I asked this on your helpful comment! It just made me think of that kindle using relative. I second using that wiki and removing drm from all your books.
It is possible but way beyond my ability. I suspect it would be a pretty complex task because it requires keys to be obtained from Amazon, and the process is often a little different for each of the many many versions of the Kindle. Most people would need a tech-capable helper to do it for them.
Honestly, there should be a law requiring software unlocking for any manufacturer-abandoned hardware.
There are so many more brilliant alternative devices.
I jumped a couple of years ago and have never looked back.Suggestions? I still have an early gen kindle (that was ad supported), and I jailbroke it and have been pretty happy with it ever since.
I went with Kobo, it works fabulously, has a good library for me to buy books from. I can download books myself and sideload as needed. Links nicely with Caliber to manage my book collection. Still working fine. I’m mindful that a couple of years is a long time in the tech world, so i’d hope that there are now many more alternatives.
That’s cool! Yea I’ve looked at the Kobo devices. I think for me, the lower cost of the kindle, especially with the ad supported version (which I bypassed by literally never connecting it to Wi-Fi), was a big plus for me at the time. I assume Amazon subsidized some of the cost assuming you’d buy from their store. I just sideloaded all my ebooks of course.
When it dies I’ll definitely be looking for a new option.
They definitely subsidized them. It’s part of their business model.
I just got a Kobo Libre Color and I’m blown away by the quality. For the general crowd it has the same “it just works” appeal as Kindles, but for the tech crowd it’s an open book. You can even ssh into it without the need for jailbreaking.
Please please please stop trying to get me to accidentally lose my older Kobo
That does sound temping!
Well, that’s what happens if you make yourself dependent on outside resources like that.
I think you meant to post this to LeopardsAteMyFace.
The giant evil monopolistic megacorp enshittified another thing?
Wow!
No way!
Unprecedented!
Not your tech, not your cloud, not your book, it ain’t fucking yours.
You have just been renting a device and access to their content. You have been paying for convenience.
I can totally empathize, I was so annoyed last year when Pinguin Random House UK stopped releasing security updates, I had to throw away half my books :/
I moved to a Kobo e-reader a while back as part of de-Amazoning my life, and while I’m annoyed that they’ve stopped supporting my 2011 Kindle Keyboard, it means I can finally close my account.
The Kindle is still perfectly usable after all these years. I jailbroke it not long after I bought it because I hated the wallpapers. I found a website where you could create your own, so I have a lovely array of images on it. One time I dropped it in the bath, and bought a new one. That turned out to be one of a run of KKs that developed a crack in the case, so I phoned customer service and sent it off for a replacement (I know, right?!?). While waiting for it to arrive, I dug out my old drowned reader and charged it up - and it was fine!! I sold the replacement when it arrived.
And now this: “To minimize any disruption, we’re offering a promotional code for 20% off select new Kindle devices as well as a £15 eBook credit that will be automatically added to your account after purchasing a new device”. As if. Fuck off.
Theres an open source ebook called the PineNote, for those that dont want proprietary software shutting you down.
Kindle 11?
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To be fair, 14+ years of supporting a device with software updates does not seem that bad, and the thing if I remember correctly was VERY cheap.
EDIT: Okay, I’m genuinely confused about the downvotes. Why is 14+ years of device support not good, Lemmy?
EDIT2: Okay, I see the problem now. Definitely not like phones no longer getting updates, it breaks the core functionality.
- When support ends, you cannot download any of your purchases.
- If you factory reset your device, it will not work. Literally, this is what Amazon said. You will not be able to use your device if you ever need to factory reset it.
- The only thing you can do is read the books you already downloaded.
It’s perfectly fine to no longer make updates for legacy hardware. But to prevent users from downloading the books they paid for is absurd. Ebooks are just fancy packaged HTML files. No reason Amazon should prevent you from downloading them.
The average consumer is screwed and will buy a new device. The more technical users will just jailbreak it. Regardless, this will create lots of ewaste as the average consumer is far from technical.
They shouldn’t have to keep supporting a device in order to keep being able to using it.
Because it’s a simple e-reader, people should still be able to add books and use the device regardless of store support. They also warn you’ll brick the device if you do a factory reset.
I thought you could manually add books to kindle, but maybe that isn’t the case based on the article.
