Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

All Kindles can now be jailbroken

kindlemodding.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 438 posts

Re: All Kindles can now be jailbroken

#271

Post by dlenski »

OuterVale wrote: post #4

Relevant recent discussion: Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th - 299 Points | 173 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43070155 Amazon ends kindle ebooks "Download and Transfer via USB" - 121 Points | 94 Comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43041726

Does a jail broken Kindle allow me to remove the DRM from Kindle ebooks downloaded to it?

(I genuinely don't know. Until now, I've always downloaded Kindle purchases via ”Download and transfer via USB”, then stripped the DRM and transferred to the device with Calibre.)

Re: All Kindles can now be jailbroken

#272

Post by zelphirkalt »

fvrther wrote: post #39

Kobo are giving you root access with telnet from the start. You can flash modded firmwares, change the backend servers to phone your own calibre-web instance, install ssh, koreader and even a tailscale vpn on it. They even have UART pins labelled on their board. These are amazing devices to play with. And they read pretty much everything you throw on their storage: epub, cbz, cbr, pdf..

I recently had a very bad experience with Kobo.com. Bought an ebook thinking I could simply download and view it on computer. haha was I naive... I could not download it from the website, instead the download gave me some XML file for some Adobe shit app, which would then download it. But I did not sign up to download and install Adobe shit on my machine. So another option is using the Kobo app. But guess what... they don't have it for GNU/Linux. And I thought maybe I can use it with WINE, but their friggin download link for the app did not even work in Firefox, even when allowing all the third party crap they put on that page to load. So that way was also blocked. OK, I thought, let's get it refunded then. But good luck!!! finding any kind of support e-mail address! All their docs and links brought me back to their chat bot, which did not help me and instead always directed me to the docs again.

Worse, they have the audacity to state on their pages that only some ebooks are eligible for a refund and to find out whether yours is, they send you back into the docs and chat bot loop. I guess they don't want people to refund, so they made finding any contact info especially difficult.

How to make a real shitty user experience 101, presented to you by kobo.com. With this it is clear to me, that I will never again buy any ebooks from them. For anyone, who does not own their Kobo device already, I say hands off this one! Maybe buy the book and download a DRM free ebook from ... elsewhere. That way you pay, can have a clean conscience and enjoy your ebook.

Re: All Kindles can now be jailbroken

#273

Post by laserlight »

kelnos wrote: post #227
laserlight wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was something like “Couldn't connect to Kindle Store”.

Did you see the "Troubleshooting" section after the jailbreak install instructions?

Thanks for your help. I've just tried it. It failed with “unexpected error” again --- I believe the first error I got was also this one. I'm not sure what I might be doing wrong.

Re: All Kindles can now be jailbroken

#274

Post by paulcole »

ornornor wrote: post #237
m000 wrote: post #188

What are some "killer" applications that would tempt the casual Kindle user to jailbreak the device? I can see someone has ported syncthing [1], which could be convenient for syncing the contents of the device. But probably still too much work compared to using e.g. Calibre and a USB cable a few times per year. [1] https://syncthing.net/

Koreader is much better than the stock software.

In what ways specifically?

Re: All Kindles can now be jailbroken

#275

Post by rr808 »

zuppy wrote: post #119
pathartl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved to Kobo because I bought my partner the Kindle Oasis and just after a year the battery couldn't hold a charge. I contacted Amazon and they would only give me 10% off a new device. I only found one person on the internet who was courageous enough to open one up. The screen was epoxied to the body with no way of opening the device without destroying the screen. So I got her a Kobo Libra H2O. Just as waterproof,…

my biggest fear from moving out of kindle is losing access to the store. they did a good job securing most of the authors and books. what’s your source for books and how often it happens for the books you’re looking for to be unavailable?

I use the libby app on Kobo to get books from the library. Its just what I need. I can add epubs and pdfs from dropbox but never use that any more.

Re: All Kindles can now be jailbroken

#276

Post by GTP »

JansjoFromIkea wrote: post #238
pathartl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved to Kobo because I bought my partner the Kindle Oasis and just after a year the battery couldn't hold a charge. I contacted Amazon and they would only give me 10% off a new device. I only found one person on the internet who was courageous enough to open one up. The screen was epoxied to the body with no way of opening the device without destroying the screen. So I got her a Kobo Libra H2O. Just as waterproof,…

I got a Kindle (moving on from an absolutely ancient rooted Nook) purely because the Oasis looked so nice I'll never get a Kindle again because I was blown away by how impossible it was to repair (plus the closed system really sucks). Mine broke for no reason at all a bit ago; my best guess is the battery started to swell inside it and that broke the screen. Got a Forma super cheap ($25!) and I've been super happy wi…

Where did you find a Kobo Forma so cheap? A quick check on Ebay lists the cheapest at 150€, but maybe I'm looking at the wrong model.

Re: All Kindles can now be jailbroken

#277

Post by nunez »

anon743448 wrote: post #265
pathartl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved to Kobo because I bought my partner the Kindle Oasis and just after a year the battery couldn't hold a charge. I contacted Amazon and they would only give me 10% off a new device. I only found one person on the internet who was courageous enough to open one up. The screen was epoxied to the body with no way of opening the device without destroying the screen. So I got her a Kobo Libra H2O. Just as waterproof,…

This shows the decline in Amazon's customer service. I had several Kindles starting with Kindle Keyboard. At that time, Amazon's service was beyond amazing. At one point, I had some issue with one of the Kindle while it was past 1 year. Amazon sent overnighted new Kindle for free when I was just hoping they give me some troubleshooting steps. I stopped using Kindle about 4-5 years ago mostly because of all the bad pr…

I'm on the BOOX train as well. I wanted a device that I could read books and catch up on HN on. Kindles do great with the former (if you're bought into their ecosystem) but suck badly for the latter. (Silk Browser is still too slow and renders all pages server-side with no ability to change this.) My BOOX Page 7 does everything I want and more, though I did choose to root and debloat it as well as install a firewall given the company's (ONYX) shady backgrounds.

Re: All Kindles can now be jailbroken

#278

Post by ornornor »

II2II wrote: post #33
kragen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't Kobo jailbreaks still give you that? Are they even "jailbreaks"?

Yes, you can still do that. The only differences with modern Kobo devices are the loss of an external uSD slot and, on the latest modeks, the liss of the internal uSD slot. I also have a hard time describing the process as jail breaking. Updates to the Kobo are simply unprotected zip files which contain firmware updates along with a gzipped tarball that contain updated files for the filesystem. Anyone with a knowledg…

I wish we could extract the kobo fonts so they could be used with koreader. I’ve found the fonts on the kobo root partition but they’re encrypted or otherwise obfuscated so simply copying the files doesn’t work :(

Re: All Kindles can now be jailbroken

#279

Post by nunez »

zuppy wrote: post #119
pathartl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved to Kobo because I bought my partner the Kindle Oasis and just after a year the battery couldn't hold a charge. I contacted Amazon and they would only give me 10% off a new device. I only found one person on the internet who was courageous enough to open one up. The screen was epoxied to the body with no way of opening the device without destroying the screen. So I got her a Kobo Libra H2O. Just as waterproof,…

my biggest fear from moving out of kindle is losing access to the store. they did a good job securing most of the authors and books. what’s your source for books and how often it happens for the books you’re looking for to be unavailable?

ebooks.com has loads of books on the platform, though they're DRMed. libby's great also.

no need to be locked into kindle anymore.

transferring books is also easy. you can install Calibre on your computer, connect the Kindle to it via USB and transfer. if you're into self-hosted, you can run Calibre on a server, either as an installed binary or in a container, and send books to it via email or dropbox.

Re: All Kindles can now be jailbroken

#280

Post by Mindwipe »

dlenski wrote: post #271
OuterVale wrote: post #4

Relevant recent discussion: Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th - 299 Points | 173 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43070155 Amazon ends kindle ebooks "Download and Transfer via USB" - 121 Points | 94 Comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43041726

Does a jail broken Kindle allow me to remove the DRM from Kindle ebooks downloaded to it? (I genuinely don't know. Until now, I've always downloaded Kindle purchases via ”Download and transfer via USB”, then stripped the DRM and transferred to the device with Calibre.)

Not in and of itself, no.

It would allow another source to downloading them from the Amazon website (as that is going away) on to a PC where stripping software can (in some cases) be applied.

It also might (but might not) be a way for decryption keys to be extracted from devices for that purpose, but it doesn't automatically provide such an exploit.

Post reply on HN