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- Hacker News
- It's my understanding that when you purchase content you get a license that is limited to terms the seller defines (i.e. only if the content is delivered from seller's approved data sources, only if the content is viewed on a seller approved device, only if the content has a seller approved drm, etc).by swframe2
- on the other hand 14 years of usage of a ~100$ device sounds ok. these days you need to be happy if things last more than a few months…by dinkblam
- What electronics are you buying that only last a few months?
- I’ve got an old DX. The fact that it doesn’t have net access anymore is now a security feature and an anti distraction mechanism. I can load what I want by USB. It doesn’t do epub3 which is a problem, but it does PDFs and conversion tricks are possible.
The Amazon ecosystem isn’t uniquely untrustworthy, but it’s not where I want to keep future electronic purchases.
by wwweston - There is a very good open source conversion tool called "Calibre". I use it all the time to convert my, erm, security backups of books I own.by lpapez
- I have an older kindle and I can still load it with epubs by emailing the unique kindle address. I think there are other ways too, via USB for example.
My understanding is that it's only downloading via the amazon kindle store that is no longer supported for devices that are considered end-of-life, which makes sense to me personally. The kindle web browser is probably based on an ancient android version of chrome. That browser is not going to last forever.
by bogrollben - It is indeed trivial to "side-load" ebooks onto an older Kindle; you plug it in via USB and drop the files into, IIRC, the "/documents" directory.
Kindle, for many years and I think even now, does not actually support EPUB, for likely unethical reasons you can probably guess; I believe the Kindle email address method hides a conversion to the AZW / AZW3 format.
by Wingman4l7 - It's an exceptionally odd decision, but planned for approx. a year now.
- First they stopped allowing download of purchased books for cable-transfer to kindle in 2025.
- Then they amped up their effort to avoid jailbreaking by suddenly releasing more firmware updates than before.
- Now they stopped supporting a wide range of kindles.
Amazon obviously assumes that they sufficiently killed the competition so they don't need to worry about customers leaving.
As for me, I managed to exit on-time, applied a jailbreak on my kindle touch and now buy my books elsewhere...
by rickdeckard - Too bad, I remember when kindles came with a free 3g connection and web browser.by mmmlinux
- Great! You currently have just one other comment pointing out that Bezos is no longer CEO, as if that were a piece of information that would make even the slightest difference in this matter. Unfortunately, my comment isn't any more sympathetic either. These people couldn't care less whether you can continue reading the digital books you've already purchased on your existing device or not. And yet you insist on paying for these books instead of just pirating them outright. Sorry, but that's exactly what Nietzsche called "slave morality." You're making a virtue out of clinging to the very structure that disadvantages you. And that whole "commercial incompetence" thing can't really be true, can it? The company dominates e-commerce, and the guy has enough cash to fly into space in his own rocket. So the business hasn't gone under yet just because it missed out on a few book sales to nerds with old devices. I find your whole perspective kind of baffling. I realized right from the start that I would either buy digital books as fully functional PDFs or continue to buy paper books that I could put on my bookshelf, because anything else would amount to exactly what you're describing now. And a small suggestion for improving your workflow: first check to see if the book is available on a torrent site, and only buy it afterward.
- It's a fascinating bit of biology to see a species collectively sacrifice its well being for the benefit of one man almost entirely without getting something in return.
Not to argue rich people never did anything useful for humanity. The pun is that one may be promoted to great status for doing great things but after that there is no obligation to continue doing great things.
We are in an endless war against the great void and we've appointed many generals who at best couldn't care less about the war and at worse joined the dark side.
You've paid the man and now you get to see books you like fly into the great nothingness. Funny as hell! He showed non of the kindness and generosity he is known for?
You should give him more money, maybe something different happens next time.
haha
by 6510 - Everybody, get up, we're leaving. Jailbreak your kindles and move to epub. It's not that difficult.
Buy books at Kobo or bookshop.org
There are so many functional kindles out there, this could be the event that changes the power dynamic and puts the author-reader relationship back in the center instead of the publisher/distributor.
It's what's slowly happening in the Movie industry now: The studios learn that they can't create sustainable value by just spending money and adding stars to a production. But directors create value. So they are suddenly put front and center and actively promoted.
by rickdeckard - It’s cute he thinks Jeff Bezos thinks about this. Whoever made this decision has probably never met anybody who has met Jeff Bezos.by mattmaroon
- Nothing is going to happen. Amazon is like a very large redwood tree that is all grown. It has no interest in fire, drought, animal life, human culture, or anything else you value. Your old Kindle is as one of its pinecones on a mantelpiece somewhere.by hyperhello
- Buying the physical book from Amazon isn’t a great way to stick it to Bezos. Just have your local bookstore order it for you, it’s easy.by mjhay
- Or just get it from your library. I rarely find myself re-visiting books, so that model is ideal to me.
- If you want to stick it to Jeff, the best part is to give/lend/sell them once you've read them. Or even better, get them from the (public) library.by pyrale
- I agree, easy and much more pleasant. Walk down the street, go into the bookshop (which is by essence a place in 3D, much more pleasant than a screen), search for a book, find it, turn a few pages, chat with the seller or with someone else interested by a book you liked, buy the book you came for, and another one you did not plan to buy, stop somewhere to drink a coffee, open the first few pages, etc... How can a website reproduce this "quality of life" ?? No need to live like during covid and lockdowns. If you live 30 km away from the nearest bookshop (like I did for 4 years) a phone call to check if the book is available and order it if it is not. Never bought anything on amazon (don't want, don't need), and maybe 10 times online in the last 25 years for very specific stuff.by ah1508
- With regards to buying physical books, https://bookshop.org/ or https://betterworldbooks.com/ are better options than Amazon imho if you're not going to buy from your local bookstore. Bookshop allows you to configure your local bookshop to receive a cut of your purchases from Bookshop (https://bookshop.org/pages/bookstores).
The public library is of course an option as many mention, assuming they have the book in their inventory. You might also be able to check it out from https://openlibrary.org/
by toomuchtodo - Amazon doesn’t care what you do, piracy isn’t a threat to Amazon, they just want to deliver the drm that the publishers demand in the easiest way possible. And they’ve made a fairly reasonable business decision that a customer who hasn’t bought a new kindle in ~15 years isn’t an important source of revenue worth supporting old devices for.
And yeah, it sucks. But it’s the ecosystem you bought into when you bought a kindle. This is what drm does. If you care about open systems, support them.
by notatoad - > Well, from now on the workflow will be:
> - Find the book I want on Amazon.
> - Buy it.
> - Find the same book on a torrent site.
> - Download it.
> - Physically copy it onto the Kindle via a USB cable.
Wait a second... you're rewarding Amazon and the publisher for their bad behavior by continuing to buy from Amazon? Nothing about this plan is discouraging the problem.
Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the author some money.
- I went to kobo when my Kindle told me if would no longer work. Now I don't buy anything from Amazonby trencedamp
- Or buy it literally from anybody other than Amazon.by jtbayly
- Assuming the author and publisher are not evil, you want to at least give them their legitamate cut.
- The next sentence says:
> And it can hardly escape anyone’s notice that I would achieve exactly the same end-state — the book on my Kindle — if I just skipped the first two stages.
by stavros - I ended up migrating to ebooks.com and importing them into Calibre (after some work to get Adobe Digital Editions to import nicely) and using that to manage my Kindle. Did the same with my old Amazon library too when they were talking about stopping you exporting the azw3'sby tsujamin
- Right? I never understood why people think it's morally right to buy books/movies/music from predatory service providersby OsrsNeedsf2P
- If you read what follows, he makes it very clear he intends to do more or less what you suggest
- As somebody who wrote a book in the past, yes, this. Give Amazon no money. If you want to spend money because pirating makes you feel bad, send a few bucks to the author, buy something on the publisher's store, or go to your local book store and spend some money there.
But never feel bad about not sending money to Amazon.