posh.wiki

As if we didn't need more of a reason to move away from Kindle.

On May 20th, Amazon will drop support for kindles made before 2013. This means they won't be able to download new titles from the Kindle store. If you sign out of your Amazon account or factory reset your device, you won't be able to use them at all. Users of affected devices can claim 20% off upgraded Kindles and a $20 ebook credit until June 10th.

This comes after Amazon removed users' ability to download Kindle ebooks to other devices last year, which I covered in an earlier blog post. These two limitations together essentially mean that anyone who owns a Kindle model which is set to become unsupported will have their entire library held hostage for the ransom of one shiny new Kindle, which start at around £100 RRP.

Affected users can use Calibre to rip their existing books off the device, but may need to jump through some additional hoops for books protected by DRM. More technical users might also want to consider jailbreaking their devices to free them from Amazon dependency.

Other Kindle users should heed the warning: don't buy ebooks from Amazon. It's likely that eventually, Amazon will deprecate another batch of Kindles, likely with similarly short notice.