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#kindle#books#drm#amazon#devices#kobo#book#old#own#still
Discussion (70 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I wonder how much this is about making it difficult for people to migrate to another platform. I recently switched to Kobo and the reader is far superior to Kindle. I had a hell of a time moving my library though.
It feels like the last major media industry that is holding out against a "future" that has been here for a long time already.
And OCR is generally just not accurate enough and still makes very visible mistakes throughout the text.
Have you read many OCR'd ebooks? I have, and every single one was massively inferior. Most I would consider barely readable.
Wait, what? What's the scope, and when does it happen?
"Dear Customer,
Thank you for being a longtime Kindle customer. We're glad our devices have served you well for as long as they have. Starting May 20, 2026 — 14 to 18 years after their initial launches — we are discontinuing support for Kindle devices released in 2012 or earlier. Here's what this means for you:
You can continue to read books already downloaded on these devices, but you will not be able to purchase, borrow, or download additional books on them after that date. If you deregister or factory reset these devices, you will not be able to re-register or use these devices in any way.
Affected devices include Kindle 1st and 2nd Generation, Kindle DX and DX Graphite, Kindle Keyboard, Kindle 4, Kindle Touch, Kindle 5, and Kindle Paperwhite 1st Generation.
To minimize any disruption, we're offering a promotional code for 20% off select new Kindle devices B4PT5XAJ74 as well as a $20 eBook credit that will be automatically added to your account after purchasing a new device (valid through June 20th, 2026, 11:59pm PST - Terms and Conditions apply). Our newer Kindle devices bring meaningful improvements in screen quality, performance and accessibility — and you'll have access to your complete Kindle library and the Kindle Store. You can also continue to read all your books on our free Kindle apps (Android, iOS, Mac, and PC) and Kindle for Web.
If you have any questions or require assistance, please visit https://www.amazon.com/help/kindle/devicedeprecation.
Sincerely, The Kindle Team"
My jailbroken Kindle has been sitting in a drawer for a while, but I do go into phases where I am using it heavily for months at a time. But, what I'm really getting at is, I don't find myself having to undertake the procedure to root a Kindle on a regular basis.
Could someone clarify for me -- if I nab another secondhand device from eBay after May 20, will I be able to jailbreak it?
Will I be able to load books via USB? Or there is some new DRM the kindle won’t be able to decrypt?
That does minimize the disruption for me. In fact I will never buy a new kindle nor buy an ebook from amazon ever again.
I think the more plausible and likely explanations are:
1. Kindles take a beating when people actually use them instead of putting them in a drawer. Not many older kindles are still in circulation that are old + used. How good is a 14 year old lithium battery at best doing?
2. Added to the above, how is a 14 year old CPU doing when trying to support modern features and eBooks that now have metadata that did not exist at the time, such as fancier typesetting and color?
3. As for the Windows app, it's terrible. Horrible. Awful. Nobody liked it. Nobody uses it. It will not be missed.
All of these discontinued devices support the AWZ4-format (which can be de-drmed and what im guessing this whole thing is about), but the newer ones use KFX which locks you perfectly into the Amazon and Kindle-ecosystem
This is a really unfortunate move by Amazon. My next e-reader will be one that I own (instead of just rent).
Glad that I took the time to jailbreak and pause updates on my 2017 kindle paperwhite while I could.
Their main advantage is providing access to all e-reading apps available on the Google Play Store, including Amazon's own Kindle app, as well as sideloaded ones such as KOReader.
On the downside, the battery life on those isn't as good as that of dedicated Kindles, Kobos, or other lightweight e-readers, but they still hold a charge for four or five days if one turns off their antennas, which is plenty of time to recharge them.
As for the ebooks themselves, I switched to purchasing from Kobo and other ebook stores. Some sell DRM-less ePubs, which is nice, while those that come with DRM can be easily liberated. And for the occasional Kindle-exclusive that is struck with (temporarily) unbreakable DRM, the Kindle app, although annoying, works well enough.
Also hearing good things about XTEINK X4.
I used that research to build something similar. It only works for manga and comics right now, but I have been tinkering with implementing glyph support as well to be able to handle full books.
https://github.com/Alexia/kandle-downloader
The original research is here, but the web site is down right now. https://blog.pixelmelt.dev/kindle-web-drm/
Any idea why your script does not seem to flag as a valid greasemonkey script when I try to use it in the Falkon (KDE) browser? Even if I attempt to add it manually, the script then disappears from my gm scripts.
Well, I happen to use it everyday. I honestly don't know what exactly is "terrible/horrible/awful" about it. I'm neutral about its UX - neither memorable nor despicable. It may be missed if the new app's UX turns out to be worse on whatever metrics you're using.
I'll never own a kindle again. Does anyone know which platforms work with Calibre De-DRM? Or do we need to build a screen cap tool for transforming books to an open format?
It's so much worse, they've literally destroyed real physical books in the hopes of that helping them "workaround" copyright, which we "regular" citizens need to comply with: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
I guess it depends by your definition of "worse", the process of buying books and destroying them was considered "transformative" enough to be considered legal, while Anthropic later did piracy and kind of legally undermined the whole book scanning operation.
Music is quite similar, and I've actually seen piracy justified by saying that "eh, the musicians are screwed either way". And of course, that piracy enabled suno.ai, which is now making sure that the musicians are really screwed.
But with the state of digital goods disrepect for the customer and locking us in mustache twirling reasons, I have better ways to spend my income. Yes I am not above reading shadow copies of books at times, but I'd rather kindle sell all titles as DRM free on rootable devices and their convenient storefront would be enough for me to direct my business there more.
There are aspects of Kindle I don't love--the constantly changing cover art for books I've purchased--but I've never run into an actual problem. I've got 2,500 books on my Kindle devices, and I can access them anywhere in the world at any time on my dedicated readers, my phone, my laptop (via Kindle Cloud Reader).
If DRM is the price I have to pay for a dead-simple ecosystem, multi-device support and free cloud storage, well, I guess I'm happy to pay it.
That makes one of us. To each their own, I guess.
I also have an old Kindle 4 that needs to be jailbroken before the May 30th deadline. Maybe I'll do that today. Gets you out of the ecosystem. And old Kindles can be found pretty cheap.
Edit: It’s been a while. Looks like the process is more streamlined, but still not what it used to be.
Booklore seems great, but I'll admit there may be even better options. However this is the future of books for me. I'd like to start replacing more and more of my physical books with pdf/epub copies. It's been hard because there is nothing I love more than sitting down with a physical book. But this is definitely far more convenient.
I now want to start building up a research paper library in the same system.
I use Calibre + Calibre Web. Definitely a bit old and clunky, but reliable.
I'm hoping that with the discontinuation of:
https://read.amazon.com/kindle-notebook
that it will become possible to view Kindle Scribe notebooks in this new application as it is to view them in the Kindle App on Android (when it doesn't crash).
Amazon abandoning +14yo products, I don't care. I'm surprised they kept them alive that long. And they'll still work, just not with the store.
The DRM/Kindle for PC thing, I don't care. I'm perfectly aware that "buying" a digital good is actually a temporary license. I'm paying for the convenience, not to own "something". And since I've paid my fair share of "copie privée" tax, if I want to grab a persistent copy of an ebook I purchased on Amazon, I got it from the high seas.