Amazon are withdrawing support from their older Kindles on May 20th - Is my old kindle now defunct ?

 

Amazon’s Kindle eReaders were ahead of their time when they first emerged in the late noughties, and were the first of the e-ink readers to hit the mass market. They have amassed a large following of dedicated reader fans since then. 

There has been considerable concern voiced amongst the Kindle fanbase over the recent announcement  by Amazon that they are withdrawing support from their older devices from May 20th, and readers will then no longer be able to use them to buy books from Amazon. The range of devices affected is quite significant and Amazon also recently confirmed they are no longer allowing books purchased by subscribers and located in the Amazon cloud to be downloaded directly to their pcs.

Why have they risked alienating their customer base by doing this ?

The excuse given is that “..the hardware {i.e. of older kindles} simply can’t keep up with modern software requirements..”. This rather lame attempt to justify the moves doesn't really make much sense, and is, frankly, disingenuous – Amazon could perfectly easily have ensured they still functioned, but are simply more interested in getting you to upgrade to a newer machine, which they will then stop supporting a year or two hence…and thus the continued ‘obsolescence cycle’ keeps Bezos’s profits rolling in nicely.

The snag is that by restricting access to their already rather overpriced ebooks in this way they are effectively ‘cutting off their noses to spite their faces’, as the old saying goes. 

The vast majority of Amazon’s eBook profits come from selling the books – the early devices were effectively marketed as loss-leaders to facilitate this, so logically you would expect them to want to maintain readership for as long as their older devices allowed and make access to their store as easy as possible. Not a bit of it, though…the ‘double whammy’ of device deprecation and stopping pc access to customers' existing libraries would seem to be a massive own goal for them on the face of it…..

What can I actually do with my old Kindle – is it just an expensive paperweight now ?

The answer to the last part of the question is a definite “No!”, so don’t throw your Kindle in the nearest skip just yet !

There’s a lot you can still do with your faithful old stalwart without any need for Amazon’s ‘services’, and many of us who object to ‘paying through the nose’ for books from the Amazon’s bookstore have been saving money by using our Kindles 'offline' for many years.

Fortunately, it has always been possible to get books into a Kindle’s reader memory by a process called ‘side-loading’. The Kindle’s operating system, which is a variant of the Linux OS, effectively turns it into a removable drive when connected to a USB port on a Windows or Mac computer. Provided you have the necessary USB lead (i.e. USB 2.0 data compatible, with a standard USB-B male connector at one end and a USB-B micro connector at the other), and your pc has the necessary drivers, you will be able to load eBook files into your Kindle.

One slight complication is that Kindles can’t handle the de-facto ‘industry standard’ eBook format, which is .epub, and you’ll need to convert any books you have in this format to either the proprietary Amazon .azw format or to .mobi format, before your Kindle will recognise them. You can, of course also still access anything you’ve already downloaded to the Kindle. What you can’t do anymore is to browse your eBooks via wifi from the Kindle or buy more from the bookstore.

Is there any way of retrieving your amazon cloud books and transferring them to the Kindle ? Although, as discussed, Amazon have stopped pc downloads, you can still access your books from a tablet or smartphone using the ‘Kindle for Android’ app. This will allow you to read the book on a specific device, but it won’t let you transfer it as a .azw file to your Kindle. There is a report that older versions of the ‘Kindle for pc’ software will still allow direct download as .azw to a pc, although this may cease to work when Amazon realise it’s a possible ‘loophole’ for avoiding their control and block it.

It’s of note that Amazon are effectively restricting access to books you as their customer have paid for from the device you bought them with – there may be a legal aspect to this which could be challenged in the courts – it will be interesting to see whether anyone actually takes Amazon on over this.

How should I best use my Kindle going forward ?

The most obvious thing to do is to ignore Amazon's 'ecosystem' (as they call it nowadays) completely.  If you have any Amazon books still in your device’s memory, leave the device registered for now. If you de-register it, 2 things will happen: a) its memory will be cleared and b) you won’t be able to re-register it.  Leaving it won’t affect your ability to side-load books, so if in doubt, don’t de-register.

The next step is to install ‘Calibre’ on your pc if you haven’t already done so. This is an excellent piece of free eBook management software, and will store all your books in one convenient place. It will also convert books from .epub to .mobi for you - you’ll need this to get any .epub files you want to read into your Kindle. If you connect your Kindle to your pc via the USB data lead I described earlier, Calibre will ‘talk’ to it directly, and you can shuttle books in and out of its memory easily, and covert between formats as required. This helps avoid cluttering up your Kindle’s with a complete book  collection, most of which you may never get round to reading. By managing your books this way, you’ll also prolong you Kindle’s battery life – older Kindles use quite a bit of power indexing new books, and most of the older Kindles are now at least 15 years old, so their batteries need as much tlc as you can give them.

Once you're connected to calibre, copy any Amazon books into your pc calbre library for safe-keeping. You can the re-load them at a later date if required, e.g. if you decide to de-register.

But if I‘m not using Amazon, where do I get more books ?

There are countless free eBooks available on the net nowadays. If you’re prepared to use the so-called ‘shadow’ libraries and have access to a VPN, you can still download a host of titles including some recent releases. There is absolutely no need to go short of reading matter just because Amazon have cut your Kindle off 'in its prime'…you’ll also be able to prolong its battery life by switching off the Kindle’s now obsolete wifi. More to the point, you’ll save a shed-load of money into the bargain by not using Amazon at all.

Where can I get more info about older Kindles ?

As you’ll probably have already gathered, I’m a confirmed devotee of older Kindles, and have published several unofficial guides to the various models that have passed through my hands. You can download the guides for the Kindle Touch 4th Gen (D01200) and the corresponding 4th Gen keyboard model (D01100), as well as the 7th Gen Paperwhite  from my website – these guides will give you chapter and verse on how to set up and transfer books to and from these devices independently of Amazon, as well as some other useful hints and tips on where to get books.

Feel free to use the comments column in this blog if you need further advice.

Happy future Kindle-ing…..

First Published 11.4.26

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