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Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

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Re: Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

#131

Post by 47282847 »

boneitis wrote: post #28
sgiratch wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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…

I don’t see the point in buying a Kindle if you plan to jailbreak it anyway. Hardware wise, a wide range of better alternatives are available.

Re: Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

#132

Post by zshn25 »

asveikau wrote: post #53
UltraSane wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is silly because you can easily just use OCR and screenshots to create DRM free versions of Kindle books.

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, bu…

Stirling PDF https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF is a free self-hosted PDF tool that can do very accurate OCR while keeping the formatting.

Re: Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

#133

Post by zshn25 »

UltraSane wrote: post #97
estimator7292 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reada…

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. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhJ9zqY8Da0

Open-source, free version of this is Stirling PDF https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF where you can do very accurate OCR while keep the formatting.

Re: Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

#134

Post by dmantis »

rgovostes wrote: post #95

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 don't see how their measures will help. It might have helped a few years ago, but one can literally ask to recreate the full book contents 1-to-1 with any local uncensored LLM just from a video of changing pages. You don't even need to break a DRM in a classical way.

If I were them, I would rather respect my users than fight with windmills.

Re: Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

#135

Post by PearlRiver »

sbarre wrote: post #56
jm4 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gets even weirder in the Netherlands were the book industry has created a cartel. They have a minimum price that you cannot go under.

Of course what happened is that lots of people just started to import English paperbacks bypassing all the local laws. The price difference was just insane.

Dutch people in general do not have an overinflated view of their own language like in France.

Re: Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

#136

Post by sbarre »

aaronscott wrote: post #80
sbarre wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I flashed Crosspoint on it as soon as I got it.. Seeing the improvements it provided was partly what convinced me to buy the device.

I really appreciate that the company that makes the device has embraced the community firmware scene and even links directly to them from their website as a semi-blessed alternative to their official one.

Re: Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

#137

Post by sbarre »

alanfranz wrote: post #120
sbarre wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

they are not bricking the units. just kindle store won't be available anymore, and the azw/epub version which is supported on your kindles won't be provided anymore by amazon anywhere. what is on the kindle will stay and keep working. if you reset the kindle, DRMed content won't work anymore.

Ah cool, well that's fine, I don't load DRM content on it anyways.

Re: Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

#138

Post by sbarre »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #101
mh- wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes totally agreed. I pay for streaming music and for Youtube because the costs make sense to me for what I get.

I used to pay for Netflix but now that there's so many different streaming services I have returned to the high seas because we just don't watch enough shows (maybe 3-5 shows a year?), yet they are spread across different services that all cost $20/month now, so the costs don't make sense for us.

For books, honestly, I refuse to accept that an EPUB costs $25 when the hardcover version costs $30. I also have heard first-hand how little of that $25 goes to the author (for the average author, not for a famous one)..

I do try to buy digital books directly from authors when I can, which is increasingly an option from upcoming writers, but otherwise, yarrrr...

Re: Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

#139

Post by jasomill »

UltraSane wrote: post #94
sbarre wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is really easy to buy a book, cut the spine off and feed the pages into a sheet fed scanner.

This reminds me of college, where I used to take my textbooks to the local copy shop to get the pages sliced out and three-hole punched so I only had to carry around currently relevant chapters rather than 30 lbs of books.

As for e-books, long story short, my low-tech chop-and-punch method tended to be cheaper and/or more convenient than the available legal e-book options at the time.

I considered scanning, and even had access to a sheet-fed duplex scanner, but given that the only mobile device I had at the time, a 17" PowerBook G4, was both awkward as an e-book reader and heavier than the unbound printed pages I was carrying around, it wasn't worth the hassle.

Re: Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

#140

Post by jasomill »

carlosjobim wrote: post #100
jm4 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Given how quickly full-quality releases of movies and TV shows appear after they're first streamed, this is surprising to me, at least so long as the PC and/or Android Kindle apps continue to exist.
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