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.
They do this after they stop letting download what you paid for and transfer via USB.
I downloaded my whole library, cracked all the DRM and dumped the AZWs to ePubs as soon as they announced that, and sent in an account deletion request. When they made it a requirement to use their “cloud” to do anything with your Kindle I knew it was over.
We all knew it was coming, any way to screw us they’ll do it, they don’t need customer service anymore since they killed most competition and people are stuck with Amazon or Piracy.
Personally I’ll send an author a donation if I can’t buy direct from them in DRM-Free formats.
I was looking at a Boox Go Color to add in support for my manga and comics as well as my library of novels but with Android getting really creepy I’m not so sure I want to be tied to what I see as a dying ecosystem again because Boox uses it as their OS.
The Pine64 stuff looks like a good option, but it has no expansion, which was always a problem with Kindle since even their 128GB internal flash of the PineNote (that si much larger than any Kindle version) isn’t enough to load my manuals. That’s actually why I have the 1st Gen Kindle Keyboard, and not the DX, with so little storage and no expansion option the PDF support and a screen large enough to make things locked to formatting for 8 1/2 x 11 readable was pretty pointless.
I went with a Kobo Libra Color for that same reason when I was looking for an ereader. Between being able to sideload whatever I want, the ability to self-host books and sync them with Calibre, and solid support with Koreade for .cbzs, it just seemed perfect in comparison. I don’t really bother with storage or expansion slot options, though, so you might have to poke around and see what’s there if that’s a main selling point.