So their inhouse AI which they are forcing all their devs on is not capable of figuring out how to render what is basically the equivalent of an .md onto the older Kindles?
Amazon's attitude towards its Kindle device customers is one of lofty disregard.
Every time they announce new Kindle products, half of the comments are like "I hope they have buttons," "I hope they bring back the Oasis," etc.
But they appear to exult in dashing the hopes of their customers, or at the very least they don't care about them at all. They've doubled down on no-key devices with stupid pens, pointless and poorly-implemented color, and tiny or excessively large form factors with little in between. It's kind of crazy just how much they don't seem to care.
The subtext of the article indicates that the problem isn't discontinuing support alone, but discontinuing support without offering those customers a reasonable replacement for their old devices that had keys and buttons. (Even if it's just a couple of buttons.)
I was looking for a good rationalization to leave the ecosystem, one-click e-books is great and having old device that I can take anywhere not caring about it getting beaten up even more was another major advantage.
Removing some old book I had was the first major red flag.
Having used an early kindle and a recent kindle, they are incredibly similar. One of the main innovations of the new models appears to be adverts you have to pay to get rid of.
Also gradually phasing out support of formats like mobi, in such subtle ways that if you open a mobi file you cannot go back to the library, but have to cold-reboot your device...
My current kindle is my third one, and is the last. I will never ever pay for a kindle to Amazon, due to its user hostility.
Oh, and also you cannot move ebooks between accounts, even not with a lot of friction, eg. support tickets, which would be a fair way to game piracy and unwanted lending, which was some inconvinience for me in a situation. Not a huge monetary loss for me, rather a reminder that when you pay to Amazon (or Valve, or any other contemporary DRM-burdened vendor) you are only leasing...
My kindle from 2012 used to have ads you needed to pay for to get rid of. It was sold as separate product with or without ads at a time. I had one with ads.
I keep it offline in airplane mode permanently from 2016 and haven't seen a single ad in a long long time.
You'll get a new ad if you take it online again, but they only persist for about a month or so before falling back to the generic 'read books' amazon ad.
I have my 2016 one setup without a password so when I open my cover the device unlocks, so I never really even see the ad unless I try.
> The ads are only shown while it's off, they're static black and white images, and 99% of the time they're for books. Totally unobjectionable
Speak for yourself. Aside from the principle, some of us don’t want to be advertised to in the comfort of our own home/bed/while we’re camping or whatever. Ads don’t have to be actively flashing, spaz-inducing insanity to be objectionable.
Not to mention that by definition an ad like this WILL be seen and attended to, even if only momentarily. That in itself is also objectionable.
That's what your nose is for. (I'm quite skilled at advancing or going back by gently tapping the kindle against my face. It helps that I'm very nearsighted so it's kind of already there)
I think the bigger issue is that there's market segments that old product reached and that newer ones don't... and you are locked into their devices by the content you've "bought."
14 year support window is pretty good. Not being able to get a modern device with buttons, and having no way to read your books with buttons, isn't.
My local library has some dead tree format books with a 500 year support window. Or dead animal or dead reed format books with more like a 2000-year support window.
>Amazon said it had supported the devices for 14 years or more and could not keep doing so indefinitely. "Technology has come a long way in that time," said a spokesperson.
Wasn't the original concept of the Kindle that it shouldn't need to be replaced by newer models?
The first time I got an ad on mine I did that and switched to the Calibre + z-library workflow. It's been most of a decade since.
It's like people have to be taught the same lesson about SAAS over and over and over again. Like what did they expect, to not get rug pulled eventually? Crazy. You own your shit or you don't. Simple as.
I have a Kindle which I think is surviving this purge. But after looking at alternatives like the Kobo, I wondered where people got their books?
Ofc there's the high seas, but I'd quite like to support the authors and I can afford ~£10 for a book now and then. But are there any stores as good/convenient as the Amazon one?
I buy the books of my favorite authors on kindle store, while sailing the high seas to read the books on my Kobo. I don't buy all the books I read though.
I was in the market to buy a new E-Reader since my old Kindle started to act funny (Random shutdowns while reading and it won't come back for several minutes).
After the announcement I decided to switch to physical books
I’ve been looking into getting an e-reader, but I’m scared to get one from Amazon due to things like this. Are there any decent hackable and/or trustworthy ones out there?
Kobo's devices let you bypass the account signup via a single option in a config file. Whether you do so or not it's easy to install koreader and start writing plugins for it. You can also hack on the linux OS they use
There are Android e-Readers, like Boox, but that does not imply it is easy to do fun stuff. Seems pretty locked down.
I have a PocketBook myself, no complaints there and you can install software (at least I can on the one I have but it is a few years old now) and thus never had the need to hack the thing.
Crap like this is why I 1.) export my Kindle books to plain PDF 2.) use a Nook Simple Touch. They work perfectly well 100% offline and are CHEAP now.
Primarily use two of these for a prepper book cache. (Two is one and one is none.) The battery lasts about a month on low cost chargers, and a pair of 32GB SD cards holds my entire collection. (A redundant pair since two is one.) Whole thing sits in an EMP bag in the bugout bag of my car, so I always have my library everywhere I go.
Exporting to PDF used to be pretty straightforward; the newest encryption is a lot harder to bypass but is still possible:
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but there is!
I've jailbroken my Kindle Scribe and installed coreader and feed it my Calibre library and its awesome.
Oh and i kept it in airplane mode from the first day, which is important so it doesnt self update and break the jailbreak.
Excuse me, but I am not sure what to make of people who:
- use Chrome, by Google, a company earning money with selling ads and wonder why the adblocker is not working
- use Kindle, by Amazon, a company that earns money by renting out DRM-protected content, that sees the Kindle just as a vehicle to (1) sell more of that content and (2) as a vehicle to lock you to their platform
Please for the love of the universe, just start to factor in the incentives a company has when selling you a thing. Before buying my Kobo reader 12 years ago (still going strong!), the first thing I researched is how to get out of Amazon DRM hell. The answer is: get a reader by a company that sells readers as a main business and has an incentive to make sure they work and use it together with something like Calibre, so you have all your books if you lose the thing somewhere. If you're going to the powerful quasi-monopolist, that may be cheaper in the short term, but what about the time you lose when they eventually hold your whole library hostage or decide to drop support on something you relied on? You're not the person picking when that happens.
If I sum up how much I spent on books in 12 years that Kobo has paid for itself 50 times over and I still don't think there is any reason to replace it with something newer.
I will just stick with Kindles. Indian heat and humidity make a Kindle unusable in 7-8 years, unless you have a 100% AC life.
Kindles last a month on a charge or two. It's very light. It's affordable.
It doesn’t show colors, but I have an android tab to read papers and technical content, anyway.
I tried looking at alternatives, but low price + extreme power efficiency + being able to sideload books is just great.
So their inhouse AI which they are forcing all their devs on is not capable of figuring out how to render what is basically the equivalent of an .md onto the older Kindles?
Amazon's attitude towards its Kindle device customers is one of lofty disregard.
Every time they announce new Kindle products, half of the comments are like "I hope they have buttons," "I hope they bring back the Oasis," etc.
But they appear to exult in dashing the hopes of their customers, or at the very least they don't care about them at all. They've doubled down on no-key devices with stupid pens, pointless and poorly-implemented color, and tiny or excessively large form factors with little in between. It's kind of crazy just how much they don't seem to care.
The subtext of the article indicates that the problem isn't discontinuing support alone, but discontinuing support without offering those customers a reasonable replacement for their old devices that had keys and buttons. (Even if it's just a couple of buttons.)
I was looking for a good rationalization to leave the ecosystem, one-click e-books is great and having old device that I can take anywhere not caring about it getting beaten up even more was another major advantage.
Removing some old book I had was the first major red flag.
Some wild irony is they once forcefully removed purchased copies of 1984 from Kindles while people were reading it.
“The books will stop working”, discussed 7 years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20297331
Having used an early kindle and a recent kindle, they are incredibly similar. One of the main innovations of the new models appears to be adverts you have to pay to get rid of.
Also gradually phasing out support of formats like mobi, in such subtle ways that if you open a mobi file you cannot go back to the library, but have to cold-reboot your device...
My current kindle is my third one, and is the last. I will never ever pay for a kindle to Amazon, due to its user hostility.
Oh, and also you cannot move ebooks between accounts, even not with a lot of friction, eg. support tickets, which would be a fair way to game piracy and unwanted lending, which was some inconvinience for me in a situation. Not a huge monetary loss for me, rather a reminder that when you pay to Amazon (or Valve, or any other contemporary DRM-burdened vendor) you are only leasing...
My kindle from 2012 used to have ads you needed to pay for to get rid of. It was sold as separate product with or without ads at a time. I had one with ads.
I keep it offline in airplane mode permanently from 2016 and haven't seen a single ad in a long long time.
You'll get a new ad if you take it online again, but they only persist for about a month or so before falling back to the generic 'read books' amazon ad.
I have my 2016 one setup without a password so when I open my cover the device unlocks, so I never really even see the ad unless I try.
I have a similar one and I never bothered to pay to get rid of the ads or keep it in aeroplane mode.
The ads are only shown while it's off, they're static black and white images, and 99% of the time they're for books. Totally unobjectionable.
If they were in the actual UI and for stuff like cars and perfume I might mind, but they aren't so I never cared.
> The ads are only shown while it's off, they're static black and white images, and 99% of the time they're for books. Totally unobjectionable
Speak for yourself. Aside from the principle, some of us don’t want to be advertised to in the comfort of our own home/bed/while we’re camping or whatever. Ads don’t have to be actively flashing, spaz-inducing insanity to be objectionable.
Not to mention that by definition an ad like this WILL be seen and attended to, even if only momentarily. That in itself is also objectionable.
Actually, the old Kindle had physical buttons, which I find more ergonomic when reading in bed
There are newer ones with physical buttons.
That's what your nose is for. (I'm quite skilled at advancing or going back by gently tapping the kindle against my face. It helps that I'm very nearsighted so it's kind of already there)
Same here. I read your comment from two inches away lol
Really wish my 1st gen Paperweight had split forward and back buttons on the right side.
But then I also understand that'd increase the price by 10% and only help right handed people with weak hands so... c'est la vie.
Just got an xteink x4 and flashed crosspoint on it, I've been tuning fonts by modifying the font generator and now it renders great.
https://www.xteink.com/products/xteink-x4
Same. It’s the best ebook experience I’ve had so far despite its size and I’ve tried a myriad of ereaders.
The only missing feature is a backlight for reading at night.
Love my x4! I saw 1.3 allows you to bring in your own fonts - any suggestions?
It also added a list of fonts that can be directly downloaded, not had chance to try them out yet
My 14 year old Kindle functions so perfectly I've no desire to upgrade. This is exactly why KOReader and all the jailbreaks exist.
So it will be possible to jailbreak it and upload my own files still?
14 years support window is so insanely good. But as it goes...
You either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.
I think the bigger issue is that there's market segments that old product reached and that newer ones don't... and you are locked into their devices by the content you've "bought."
14 year support window is pretty good. Not being able to get a modern device with buttons, and having no way to read your books with buttons, isn't.
A bookshelf can have books that are 100s of years old.
My local library has some dead tree format books with a 500 year support window. Or dead animal or dead reed format books with more like a 2000-year support window.
Planned obsolescence is always bad.
Maybe for ebook readers, but not for books.
>Amazon said it had supported the devices for 14 years or more and could not keep doing so indefinitely. "Technology has come a long way in that time," said a spokesperson.
Wasn't the original concept of the Kindle that it shouldn't need to be replaced by newer models?
I can and will still use mine to read files.
What is discontinued is integration with Amazon account. Which seems fair to me to be fair.
Less fair when they sold an integrated device and store
It'd be fair if they unlocked them.
My kindle will not be aware of it. It has been in airplane mode ever since I bought it.
Its clock no longer tells correct time; but it’s fine, a book doesn’t have to do that - and I have a watch.
Glad I went the Kobo route. Koreader beats Kindle any day of the week.
Deadwood loyalists raise an eyebrow and keep reading.
There I go
Turn the page
On the road again
Joke's on them, I keep the Kindle permanently on airplane mode anyway.
Not sure if you’re joking but is it possible to even do that? I understand some books are kept on their cloud servers and only some get downloaded.
Yes, it’s possible. Note: no downloads work in airplane mode. Cable works just as well though.
I had an old kindle that I never connected to the net or with an amazon account. I loaded books by USB.
Damn near impossible to find DRM free books to purchase though.
> Damn near impossible to find DRM free books to purchase
My method has always been to buy physical books (which is also better to support the author, because they get a bigger % of the price you pay.
And then, there are other creative ways to download the ebook... (without buying from Amazon, or other monopolists.)
It is still possible to remove DRM and export to PDF or epub. Not point-and-click easy, though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/1q1uza4/successful...
While Calibre makes it easy, it's even easier to just download a copy someone else has already stripped of DRM.
If publishers/authors want my money, they can release a version without DRM.
Calibre is a rather painful tool, but seems to remain the best.
Calibre web and calibre web automated downloader remove a fair bit of the clunk.
No, you choose what is downloaded locally. You can also get .mobi files and copy them to the kindle directly.
Not anymore, they have removed the option to download files for transfer via USB https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2025/02/12/download-transf...
Ironically, files downloaded from "other" sources have no issue. So they're just making it harder to buy from Amazon legally.
The first time I got an ad on mine I did that and switched to the Calibre + z-library workflow. It's been most of a decade since.
It's like people have to be taught the same lesson about SAAS over and over and over again. Like what did they expect, to not get rug pulled eventually? Crazy. You own your shit or you don't. Simple as.
You paid for the ads-supported version if you got ads...
Not always obvious. I've stopped several relatives from making that mistake.
For some reason, they're inclined to trust Amazon.
It is always obvious.
https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Kindle/dp/B0CNVCQZG1/
This is the first one that pops up if you search "kindle" on Amazon.
I'm not sure how more clearly you could show the variants with and without ads.
Tip: if you let kids and others in your home use a Kindle and they might unintentionally turn off the airplane mode ...
Go to your router settings and blacklist the Kindle's mac id.
Sleep peacefully that your kindle will never be bricked or wiped by a software update.
One benefit of jailbreaking - https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreaking/post-jailbreak/disabl...
Yeah mines been on airplane mode for probably a decade now, really not seeing a reason to ever connect it to the internet
Is it possible that Amazon views the Kindle as less than profitable, and so they’re taking the hard line tactic to try and boost revenue?
I have a Kindle which I think is surviving this purge. But after looking at alternatives like the Kobo, I wondered where people got their books?
Ofc there's the high seas, but I'd quite like to support the authors and I can afford ~£10 for a book now and then. But are there any stores as good/convenient as the Amazon one?
I buy the books of my favorite authors on kindle store, while sailing the high seas to read the books on my Kobo. I don't buy all the books I read though.
is the kobo store not good/convenient compared to kindle? I thought the kobo store was pretty good, but it is my first and only e-reader.
Inversely, try to use a kindle as a Korean.
I was in the market to buy a new E-Reader since my old Kindle started to act funny (Random shutdowns while reading and it won't come back for several minutes).
After the announcement I decided to switch to physical books
I’ve been looking into getting an e-reader, but I’m scared to get one from Amazon due to things like this. Are there any decent hackable and/or trustworthy ones out there?
Kobo's devices let you bypass the account signup via a single option in a config file. Whether you do so or not it's easy to install koreader and start writing plugins for it. You can also hack on the linux OS they use
Yep, there's a plethora of tweaks and stuff out there to mess with Kobos to make them your own, and it's not hard to do.
Been super happy with my Kobo Clara.
You can also sync to your own library - eg calibreweb.
It’s not too disgusting, and over-the-air is nice to have.
There are Android e-Readers, like Boox, but that does not imply it is easy to do fun stuff. Seems pretty locked down. I have a PocketBook myself, no complaints there and you can install software (at least I can on the one I have but it is a few years old now) and thus never had the need to hack the thing.
Crap like this is why I 1.) export my Kindle books to plain PDF 2.) use a Nook Simple Touch. They work perfectly well 100% offline and are CHEAP now.
Primarily use two of these for a prepper book cache. (Two is one and one is none.) The battery lasts about a month on low cost chargers, and a pair of 32GB SD cards holds my entire collection. (A redundant pair since two is one.) Whole thing sits in an EMP bag in the bugout bag of my car, so I always have my library everywhere I go.
Exporting to PDF used to be pretty straightforward; the newest encryption is a lot harder to bypass but is still possible:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/1q1uza4/successful...
PDF is an atrocious format for this though. Why not export to ePub?
I do both, actually. But I don’t notice the difference personally.
There's not much of one until you need to reflow the book for a different reader
Two of my paperwhites died so i took the opportunity to switch to kobo and couldn't be happier.
Brought a Kobo after Amazon locked my account. There is no going back to a Kindle.
The price of convenience.
If only there was a way to download e-books and upload them to a Kindle with Calibre.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but there is! I've jailbroken my Kindle Scribe and installed coreader and feed it my Calibre library and its awesome. Oh and i kept it in airplane mode from the first day, which is important so it doesnt self update and break the jailbreak.
Excuse me, but I am not sure what to make of people who:
- use Chrome, by Google, a company earning money with selling ads and wonder why the adblocker is not working
- use Kindle, by Amazon, a company that earns money by renting out DRM-protected content, that sees the Kindle just as a vehicle to (1) sell more of that content and (2) as a vehicle to lock you to their platform
Please for the love of the universe, just start to factor in the incentives a company has when selling you a thing. Before buying my Kobo reader 12 years ago (still going strong!), the first thing I researched is how to get out of Amazon DRM hell. The answer is: get a reader by a company that sells readers as a main business and has an incentive to make sure they work and use it together with something like Calibre, so you have all your books if you lose the thing somewhere. If you're going to the powerful quasi-monopolist, that may be cheaper in the short term, but what about the time you lose when they eventually hold your whole library hostage or decide to drop support on something you relied on? You're not the person picking when that happens.
If I sum up how much I spent on books in 12 years that Kobo has paid for itself 50 times over and I still don't think there is any reason to replace it with something newer.