241–250 of 288 posts
I'm not aware of it, so unless they locked new Kindle from copying books through USB and working offline I'm not understanding what is this uproar about.
I've got my Kindle for free, so are my books copied there in last 15 years...
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My typewriter has been successfully serviced 45 years after being produced.
I got it. And I've played a 1905 Martin and you can still plug a 1950s telecaster into a 1950s amp in turn plugged into wall power and everything works. Just saying, that is not the consumer electronics world in 2026.
A replacement set of tubes for a 1950s Fender amp costs $200-$400 today, just for parts. A lot more than a new Kindle. A Kindle might even be less e-waste than a set of tubes too.
You can get a Kobo Reader and disable internet access to it so it never connects to a server. You can then plug it in to your computer and it shows up as a mass storage device. Then just drop PDFs, ePubs in. I never liked Calibre, it's weirdly shoddy software, slow as a dog, and the worst UX i've ever seen in a popular app - so I needed something I could just drop my files into.
While I agree with the sentiment, one nitpick - "When you buy a Kindle, you are buying a disposable product with a predetermined shelf life. Meanwhile, when you buy a Kobo, you are buying a tool that can be maintained for a decade or more." My Kindle is still going strong after 15 years, including a few years of not using it at all when I was enjoying reading physical books. That longevity is why I'm angry about this…
I’m still using my Kindle Oasis 2nd Gen, plugged off and jailbroken, side loading my old collection or public domain books. No one has made something remotely as nice to use as the Oasis, including Amazon themselves. Jailbreaking was quite easy. The only thing that will kill my Oasis is the battery being nearly impossible to change.
I went through this migration last year. A few things that helped: Calibre is the escape hatch. Converts everything to EPUB. Even if you don't use it day-to-day, it's the best tool for getting your library out of Amazon's format. Public domain catalogs are huge now. Standard Ebooks, Internet Archive, Gutenberg - tens of thousands of well-formatted free EPUBs. Most people don't realize how much is out there. For actua…
If you're even the slightest bit tech savvy you can find a DRM stripping utility for Calibre. Apprentice Alf is long retired, but a fork of that DeDRM still is maintained
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You can send books to your kindle over USB, and I do that all the time for larger books that are above the size limit on the email system. The big problem is that Amazon no longer allows you to download books from their site to your desktop, so you have no way to actually get a purchased book and send it to the kindle even over USB. However, if you buy non-DRM books from other book sellers you won't have this problem…
They block you from doing this if you're not logged in (as I discovered after wiping and rooting one to give to a friend recently). As evidence, note that instructions for rooting them requires the device to be registered - this is because it won't be accessible over USB until you do so: https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreaking/WinterBreak/ So if you can't log in...
Amazon had recently closed their Android App Store as well. Practically all apps I had ever installed from the app store, including paid ones, have stopped working. Seems like Apps installed from their store had some internal dependence on the store app itself.