FYI if you have an older kindle you possibly can jailbreak it and getting KoReader on in.
Even newer Kindles can be jail broken, provided they're on the right version.
Combined with the announcement that they're killing the old Kindles as well...this is 100% about preventing people from liberating DRM from their books. Full stop. They are closing each and every remaining hole.
This is absolutely what it is. The easiest way to strip drm from a kindle book was through this app. You download the file, strip the drm, done. I think newer versions of the app made it harder? But old versions were still supported.
The more locked down kindle mobile apps and kindle e-readers make it more difficult, but stripping the drm will always be possible.
I wonder if it'll actually work? At the moment you can pretty much go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis and download whatever.
Probably it will have a very measurable effect. By every day it gets a bit harder to discover such services - if you know, you know. If you have to ask, you have already lost.
Also, AI chatbots outright refuse to give any answer that is remote related to piracy (or any adjacent topics). Since they take over the role of search engines, that's also a big factor IMO.
eh... if you word it correctly, an ai chatbot will tell you everything it knows about piracy lol
I stopped doing Kindle purchases in the last few years because I sensed they were going in this direction. There are tons of vendors that will give you an epub of most titles. They often come with Adobe DRM but the UX of breaking that is even easier than how it used to be with Kindle.
Sadly the Kindle Unlimited program has gotten so popular that if you wish to read anything independent, you basically can't without using Kindle.
I also make my ePubs a free download off my website which prevents me as an author enrolling in this. So just about anything on Kindle Unlimited is only for their ecosystem.
Thank you for this. I can understand why many authors don't want to do this (running a store, etc) but I wish they all did. I'll take a gander; I could use some more sci-fi!
Honestly, I think the Kindle Unlimited (KU) program should be persecuted as an illegal monopoly. A lot of authors actually don't actually like it, but they have to do it because it is the only way to have viable income. This tends to happen with more niche genres though. As an example almost all books in the harem-lit (1 guy and a bunch of lovers) genre are tied to Kindle unlimited. Meanwhile, this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy as pushing more readers to KU and thus making alternative methods of selling even more difficult. Though since KU forces exclusivity on only being sold through Amazon, the authors are forced to switch to it.
I could probably go on a similar rant with Audible too, but that is different story. In short, Amazon has way too much influence over the entire publishing industry.
Similar with “only on Audible” audio books. Not a majority yet I don’t think, but it’s a big chunk of books restricted to Amazon platform.
There's self published books and stories on other platforms. There's a bunch that are free too. There's some author's that only use Kindle, but there's plenty of independent stuff out there not Amazon.
Might depend on what you like to read. I haven't hit this a lot. There was one title my daughter wanted which was Kindle exclusive in the US but I was able to get as an Adobe epub from a European seller.
For me it's the other way round - I used to buy from them when I could dedrm, and ensure that they can never pull this kind of bait and switch on me. Every ebook I've bought can be read on any device I own. I will not accept any other level of service.
Which is silly because you can easily just use OCR and screenshots to create DRM free versions of Kindle books.
Not to mention it’s as easy to download books from Anna’s Archive as it is to buy them from Amazon. It’s weird going through so much effort to lock down books people already paid for.
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.
I suspect at least some of this comes from publisher pressure. An acquaintance works for one of the big global book publishers and his general sense from upper management is that they still hate having to sell digital books.
It feels like the last major media industry that is holding out against a "future" that has been here for a long time already.
It's all from external pressure. Amazon spending energy on ebook DRM is a negative ROI activity for them.
A vanishingly small % of would-be ebook buyers even know pirated ones exist, and an even smaller one knows how to get those onto their Kindle.
My wife buys dozens of ebooks per year on Amazon, her friends too. I'm guessing if I poll that group, none of them would even know where to start, nor care to.
"Piracy is almost always a service problem" is also true. I see a lot of people who were risen on a pirated .mp3 and .epub to move to the streaming platforms just because it's a bit more convenient.
This applies to newspapers too — if you compare the print version to the online version of a newspaper you notice that there's a lot more attention paid to the paper version. Whereas the online version has all kinds of aggressive banners and ads.
I think it's a generational thing, for a lot of publishers the internet is this newfangled thing
It is really easy to buy a book, cut the spine off and feed the pages into a sheet fed scanner.
It's to stop people from seeding new books to shadow libraries. It's not as easy to find new books on AA as on Amazon.
OCR'd ebooks are universally trash. For one, all formatting is gone. Anything in the book other than ASCII characters will vanish. You lose links within the book and all other advanced features.
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.
For books that you want to keep the formatting the best option is to use Adobe Acrobat Pro and its Editable Text and Images feature. This replaces the scanned letters with a custom TrueType font. I used this in college to scan textbooks and it worked really well. Modern OCR on books is incredibly accurate.
What OCR do you guys use? I have only seen OCR that makes a lot of errors. Having it be usable requires tons of manual review. I probably wouldn't trust an LLM to do that review because it may introduce its own errors.
Edit: downvoters, would you like to answer my question? I would genuinely like to know. I thought based on the confidence of the comment above there must be a super accurate OCR I've never heard of, but after seeing the sibling comment I'm going to guess there isn't.
> they're killing the old Kindles as well
Wait, what? What's the scope, and when does it happen?
I got this April 8th:
"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"
"or use these devices in any way"?
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?
Generally speaking, they auto update, and the latest firmware is always patched to not be jailbreakable. However airplane mode easily dodges the auto update process, and new vulnerabilities are found to enable jailbreaking eventually.
When I bought mine, it was updated to the latest firmware. I wanted to jailbreak mine, the method was “there isn’t one yet” so I set it in airplane mode. For a bit I manually copied all books over usb to the kindle, or disabled airplane mode to read new books if there wasn’t a new firmware version out yet anyway. A few months later, there was a jailbreak method. Now ive jailbroken. I can even connect it to the internet, and auto updates are prevented.
If the kindle is old enough it doesn’t recieve updates anyway though, then it should be very easy.
wtf. I’ve had my kindle since 2011, the battery still lasts weeks, it works perfectly, and I frequently praise Amazon for this. wtf.
Will I be able to load books via USB? Or there is some new DRM the kindle won’t be able to decrypt?
Yeah this is my question. My Kindle has been in airplane mode since the day I bought it.
As long as I can still keep loading books on it over USB, and it's just their DRM ecosystem that will stop working, that's fine with me.
But if they are aggressively bricking the units, if I accidentally turn on wifi by accident and it just completely stops working, I will be extremely pissed.
Jailbreak it now to avoid the risk.
Is there a tool for jailbroken Kindles to prevent this bricking from happening?
You can load DRM free books. Amazon already killed their method of loading DRM laden eBooks onto older Kindles by USB in the last year or so.
It’s sort of funny that this kind of thing could be, not just something that they will probably just get away with, but totally uncontested and not even surprising really. Just sorta like, yeah, obviously you don’t own your library and they’ll cut off access to it whenever they want!
Access to your library continues to be available with free apps on phone, or Windows, or a newer Kindle as well as any browser, so the loss of support of 14 year old mobile devices doesn’t seem like huge news. There can’t be too many still in use even.
The article appears to be about “Kindle for PC.” It does look like there’s a Windows 11 app, though, for folks who’ve switched to the post-QA OS.
I would expect most of them have had their batteries fail long ago. Especially if they were disused for an extended period of time.
I replaced the battery on my kindle 4 not that long ago. It had the best UX for extended reading when compared to newer kindles.
The biggest downside was not having a frontlit display.
I recently switch to an xteink x4, and found that several others in that community migrated from kindle 4s as well. So there are still some number of users in the world that value the device.
I'm sure there are, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. It's just that the numbers are relatively small.
I'm actually surprised that Amazon didn't offer to do a buyback of them.
> 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).
That does minimize the disruption for me. In fact I will never buy a new kindle nor buy an ebook from amazon ever again.
Not necessarily? There was a post just a year ago on how somebody jailbroke the kindle books from the web UI.
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.
I strongly disagree. If it's doing well enough for the owner then it's doing well enough. I don't understand how one can tell someone else that their computer is unacceptably slow for that other individual's personal use.
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.
I'd suggest cheap Android-based Chinese e-Ink e-readers if you want flexibility. My current one is a Bigme B6, which was for sale in my country a few months ago.
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.
Kobo, syncing with a home library (CalibreWeb) works well.
I do miss physical buttons a little, but that’s minor gripe.
You do know that both the Kobo Libra and Sage have physical buttons, right?
I'm pleased with OBOOK5. It runs Obook OS which is a Linux OS. Never nagged me to connect to WiFi or anything, I simply plugged a cable to transfer my local stuff.
Also hearing good things about XTEINK X4.
I have an XTEINK X4. It's quite small, but if that's ok with you, then it's a fantastic little reader.
Same here, I quite enjoy it. Plus there is open source software available, such as crosspoint. It’s easy to flash and an opus call away to change the behavior if you want something to work differently.
I’ve had a pair of Nook Simple Touch for over ten years and they are wonderful for PDFs. Stored 100% offline. Good for prepper books.
Both my Kindle Touch and my Kindle Paperwhite gen1 are still completely fine. And I havent noticed any typesetting etc that doesnt work.
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
It’s more difficult, but KFX drm is still possible to break.
an ePub book is basically a zipped HTML folder with static pictures and text. A 18 year old kindle can still render it easily. I expect Amazon are adding a lot more DRM and hoops than required. I also noticed if you havent read a book you downloaded for a while it wont let you read it again without re-connecting. Just glad I pulled everything onto my PC and Kobo a few years back. Agree the PC interface is pretty crappy though.
both my kindle and wife's work great and we have been using them regularly. they are actually very well made and durable devices.
> Not necessarily? There was a post just a year ago on how somebody jailbroke the kindle books from the web UI.
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/
Probably not the best place to ping for technical support, but, since you claim to be the author, and I don't see any "Issues" on your GH...
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.
> I don't see any "Issues" on your GH...
Issues and PRs are available to open.(I just have not gotten any yet.)
> 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?
Honestly, no idea. I have only tested it with Tampermonkey on Firefox. Manually installing it should still work.
I just replaced the battery on my Kindle 3rd gen (2010?) and it's basically as good as new now. Batteries are easy to find online.
> Nobody uses it. It will not be missed.
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 still own my voyage from 2014 era. Amazon forcing new formats is their choice. Deprecating old kindles is a choice. This is all about ending people's ability to remove DRM from books they bought.
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?
I've had good luck with my Kobo, for those books bought through their store. (I strip DRM from everything I can, if I can't buy without in the first place.)
Kobo seems to be the current leader. You can also load KoReader and Tailscale on it
After Anthropic wholesale pirated millions of books, and got only a slap on the wrist and no jail time, and Meta did almost the same, I've decided that "Anna's" plus used physical books plus printed new books are the right combination.
> After Anthropic wholesale pirated millions of books
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.
It's kinda poetic that in the entire process, authors get screwed thrice. First, by the publishers and retailers, who keep 80% of the revenue. Then, by the hacker culture that enables widespread, institutionalized book piracy for the sake of "information wanting to be free". And finally, by the same hacker culture gone corporate, where "grown-up" geeks conclude that, since we already have all these pirated works out there, what's the harm of training LLMs on that.
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.
Too true, and with 1000's of new books added daily, new authors are lost in the noise. Writing is a lifestyle choice and a hobby, you will need to be very lucky, have a strong following or be pushed by a big publishing house to make any money from it, even successful indie authors will earn in a year what a good programmer earns in a day.
Don't forget the 4th way they get screwed which that the AI trained on the books is spitting out a flood of new books that push the real authors out.
What are “Anna’s”?
What is Anna’s?
I never bought into Kindle because of this lockdown attitude. I buy audiobooks from audiobookstore and ebooks from google play books when lazy and itch and the other usual independent sites that sell drm free files when I'm not doing a jit in time purchase. I have a kindle I USB sideload or put files on sd card, because it has a physical keyboard.
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.
I used to feel this way, but I reconsidered my threat model. You know what format is "locked in"? Physical books. Can only exist in one location at a time. If you loan it out, you can't read it until it's returned. Subject to theft, fire, rot, bugs or simply being lost.
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.
> 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.
You can copy physical books for storage/otherwise personal use IIRC so it's not quite as locked down as a DRMd book. Not sure what the legal state of hand copying a book and then loaning it out as it probably doesn't come up much.
I mean really? Oh I can't see someone heading down to the copy shop to scan every page of war and peace and then print it out when you can get a used one for less than the paper cost..
Growing up, in school, teachers would do this all the time with our text books.
You can get pretty much the same thing from Amazon's competitors. With less burdensome DRM.
The Kindle isn't a bad device on its own. Personally I use a Kobo. But I never pay for any ebook that I can't keep indefinitely one way or another.
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.
the drm is the reason why I never bought any kindle along with the relatively small non-expandable onboard storage, though the dx was tempting to me for a bit. I've stuck with Kobo, Pocketbook, and reMarkable and have been happy with them.
When Amazon started locking it all down last year I bailed on their ecosystem for Kobo’s store, but I use a Boox device. As long as I can back it up in any format I’m happy, and as soon as Amazon crossed that line they lost my business.
I’m so happy I downloaded all my Kindle books when I still had a chance and then moved to the Kobo ecosystem, which albeit not perfect is much much better
I was kinda amazed to find out how hard it was to buy a kobo libra colour in .de -- apparently there's some kind of cartel thing going on where amazon somehow convince entire markets not to sell their competitors products. I had to order it from Hungary or something iirc.
I don't know if that is Amazon in Germany. Here all the book stores sell Tolino devices, even my local libraries loan them out.
Would you mind elaborating on the problems you have with the Kobo? I'm thinking of getting one of these once my kindle dies.
No issues here. I liberated my kindle library and put it in Google Drive. The Kobo can download books from there out of the box. The Kobo store works fine too, although a lot of books barely have any reviews if you’re into that. I have the Kobo Libra Colour and it’s by far the best reader I’ve ever owned.
Im in NZ, no issues.
Setting up syncing with a home library is a bit messy first time, but very doable.
The only other e-reader I’ve owned is a Kindle Paperwhite and it’s similar.
They're likely doing this because it's likely the only remaining loophole to their new DRM scheme. Too bad for them it's caused me to buy all my ebooks elsewhere.
If the book is readable, it can be pirated. Even the most labor-intensive piracy technique is not that difficult. And once a drm-free book is out there, it's out there.
Though sadly the new types of Kinds require a method of extracting Kindles to PDF which is an order of magnitude harder than the old Calibre DeDRM method. I had to boot Bluestacks and export license files and rub my tummy and pat my head and do the Hokey Pokey… but in the end, the books are now 100% mine.
Edit: It’s been a while. Looks like the process is more streamlined, but still not what it used to be.
Glad to have gotten off Kindle and onto Kobo years ago. Enshittification continues on. Now, we just have to wait for the publishers to put the screws to Rakuten...
> The company has disclosed to Good e-Reader that Amazon is developing a new Kindle for PC app, but it will only be compatible with Windows 11.
FWIW, I'm quite disappointed that they didn't continue in the vein of the Windows 8 app which was touch friendly and worked quite nicely w/ a stylus.
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).
A number of comments are along the lines of "people will just pirate books from Library Genesis / Anna's Archive". It seems obvious the motivation is cutting off the supply of new books to those sites.
I have my Kindle permanently in airplane mode to keep it away from Amazon's shenanigans and use Calibre to upload books to it, but if/when it breaks I have a feeling my next e-reader will be a Rakuten Kobo.
Everyday it's proven companies are their own worst enemy, from Blizzard to Amazon. Kobo should be paying Amazon for the free marketing.
I have a smattering of books on Kindle, mostly fiction/novels. But the vast majority of my book conllection consists of non-fiction/textbooks and I recently switched to Booklore on my NAS. I have over 900 textbooks and can access them anywhere via a WireGuard VPN. It's so slick!
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.
There was some whole blowup with Booklore over it being vibecoded by a single maintainer recently. I think the project has changed ownership since then, but be cautious.
I use Calibre + Calibre Web. Definitely a bit old and clunky, but reliable.
Ditto for Calibre Web. Clunky, but effective.
I wish there was a way to add books to a ‘shelf’ (a collection, which you can sync to a device) without having to open each book and add. I want to go Select + Select + Select > Add > Sync.
It's funny that the top product recommendation on the website is the "Kobo Remote Control", which is the main thing that is making me think of going to Kobo once my Kindle Paperwhite is dead.
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.
These convenient and cheap book/game/video platforms sure killed piracy. Now that piracy's gone forever, we can enshittify the whole thing again! At least I imagine that's how it went in the meeting of 35 year-old corporate suits.
> These convenient and cheap book/game/video platforms sure killed piracy.
The first rule of fight club is that you don’t talk about fight club. Though don’t have to deny its existence.
Good thing I'm discontinuing Kindle for me.
Imagine paying for ebooks in 2026 lmao