It was a good compromise, including for Amazon. DRM is immoral when you're "selling" books, because that means I don't own the actual book. I still bought plenty of them when I could easily strip the DRM. But now I'm done, never buying another DRM encrusted book from Amazon.
Side tangent: I’m the developer of Kindle Comic Converter. Kindle updates 5.19.2+ have completely broken the sideloaded manga reader with bugs like huge margins, pages being on the wrong side in 2 page landscape mode, no panel view, no % read tracker, and laggy page turns. I’ve documented the problems here and the first report was 50 days ago. https://youtu.be/Eo6K7omlE7g
And I haven’t even touched all the problems with normal sideloaded books like broken embedded/publisher fonts.
Kindle settings > help > contact us > email if you want to voice complaints.
I bought a new Kindle because of this amazing tool. Unfortunately, I can only use the device after deregistration. Have to dismiss sign-in/login every time.
Hopefully I can survive long enough a new jailbreak comes in.
You can add books using the Calibre software which converts epubs and mobi files I think. I use this with a Kindle Paperwhite 2nd Generation and avoid Amazon interaction.
While everyone is commenting about drm, there is another factor to consider: TLS. These old Kindles definitely do not support up-to-date TLS ciphersuites and understandably Amazon wants/needs to drop insecure ciphersuites from public endpoints at some point. I'm pretty sure that is also the reason why the Wikipedia integration for these old Kindles broke ages ago.
Does anyone use a Kindle anymore? I feel like the writing was on the wall ten years ago. It’s a dead end product that no one cares about. And all the shady stuff like forced deletion of books was a sign. But also, I think people have really become tired of sitting in front of screens. Physical books are more popular among friends than Kindles or other digital books are, and that wasn’t the case ten years ago.
I bought and use a Kindle specifically because it has zero distractions. All you can do is read. You're not interrupted with a text, or another app's notification, or anything like that. There's no temptation to use another app, because there are no other apps. It's just you, and your book.
I've used a kindle for years and have bought hundreds of ebooks through Amazon's platform. The convenience of being able to carry a library with me in a single device is undeniable. ~14 years of support seems reasonable, especially in the context of modern tech. And yet decisions like this always upset me. For all the limitations of physical books, I can hand my physical books to my literal children and grandchildren when I die. As long as I tend to the book, I have it. The fact that this isn't guaranteed for DRM-locked ebooks, for all their advantages, makes me feel like we are somehow going backwards, despite our progress technologically. Instead of a future where products get unambiguously better, the future seems filled with products that come with significant trade-offs. The trade-offs are beginning to not feel worth it to me.
> I can hand my physical books to my literal children and grandchildren when I die. […] The fact that this isn't guaranteed for DRM-locked ebooks
In fact, the opposite is pretty much guaranteed. To my knowledge, you can’t inherit Amazon Kindle licenses, and you definitely can’t give them away otherwise (which is the obvious next thing to do when inheriting books you think somebody else has a better use for than you).
Did something similar with my 7th gen paperwhite, turned it into a little weather and calendar display. Wrote up the process if anyone wants to try it, also the battery life on these things as a dashboard is insane, barely need to charge it.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 58.1 ms ] threadThey also killed the ability to download books from the website a while back so directly of travel is pretty clear here.
If this is a hint at much more formidable DRM coming out, could a silver lining for authors and publishers be more sales?
Or is mass piracy going to just continue, full steam ahead?
(Authors and publishers need any bit of good news they can get right now.)
And I haven’t even touched all the problems with normal sideloaded books like broken embedded/publisher fonts.
Kindle settings > help > contact us > email if you want to voice complaints.
I bought a new Kindle because of this amazing tool. Unfortunately, I can only use the device after deregistration. Have to dismiss sign-in/login every time. Hopefully I can survive long enough a new jailbreak comes in.
In fact, the opposite is pretty much guaranteed. To my knowledge, you can’t inherit Amazon Kindle licenses, and you definitely can’t give them away otherwise (which is the obvious next thing to do when inheriting books you think somebody else has a better use for than you).
https://github.com/usetrmnl/terminus
https://github.com/usetrmnl/trmnl-koreader
(I built the koreader plugin)
https://terminalbytes.com/reviving-kindle-paperwhite-7th-gen...