Amazon are withdrawing support from their older Kindles on May 20th - Is yours 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 long battery life specialist readers to hit the mass market. They have amassed a large following of dedicated reader fans since then, and have proven themselves robust and long-lasting devices. They are also the preferred vehicle for reading eBooks, given the probems associated with long-term use of LED screens. 

Amazon have been steadily phasing out support to their older devices for the past couple of years, with restrictions on registration for their oldest models, but there has been considerable concern voiced amongst the Kindle fan-base over the recent 'final' announcement  by Amazon that they are withdrawing support from all of their older devices from May 20th. This doesn't in fact cover the whole range of Kindles, but only applies to anything manufactured before 2012. It means that readers will then no longer be able to use their devices to buy books from Amazon, or access any books they have stored in the Amazon cloud. The range of devices affected is quite significant, however, and to add insult to injury, in a separate measure designed to control access to their books, 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 coming up with this 'double whammy' ?

The excuse given is that “..the hardware {i.e. of older kindles} simply can’t keep up with modern software requirements..”. This distinctly lame attempt to justify the moves doesn't really make much sense, and is, frankly, disingenuous – Amazon could perfectly easily have found a way to ensure their older models still functioned with their bookstore - if they had really wanted to. They are, of course, in reality far more interested in getting you to upgrade to a newer machine, and pay them sweetly for the privilege. They will then no doubt play the same game with the new Kindle by stopping support to that a year or two hence…thus the continued ‘obsolescence cycle’ keeps Bezos’s profits rolling in nicely. In a sense, the Kindle's inherent reliability and longevity has been its own worst enemy in this respect....by lasting far too long for its own good (as far as Amazon are concerned, at any rate !).

By why on earth have they taken the opportunity to stop you accessing your cloud books via a pc at a time when you're likely to want to retrieve them....i.e. before the 'great Kindle purge' happens ?

 The official reason quoted for removing pc access to cloud-stored books appears to be to "prevent book piracy" - in reality it's proably just to add to the difficulty of accessing anything using older Amazon technology. Anyone really wanting to 'pirate' an Amazon book need only go to one of the shadow libraries and just help themselves at no cost....all that's necessary is a fuctional VPN and a shadow library URL that hasn't yet been 'knobbled'. Amazon will, of course, be fully aware of this.

The snag Amazon have created for themselves 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. Why is this the case ?

The vast majority of Amazon’s eBook and eReader profits come from selling the books themselves – the early devices were effectively marketed as loss-leaders to facilitate book sales and 'draw in' potential new customers. Thus, 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. Although detailed device and book sales figures are difficult to come by, Amazon are likely to lose far more revenue in lost book sales than they gain by persuading those few readers that are actually prepared to go on dealing with them at all, to upgrade to a new device.....

What can I actually do with my old Kindle after May 20th – 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 in disgust just yet !

There’s a lot you can still do with your faithful old stalwart without any need for Amazon’s ‘services’. Many of us who object to ‘paying through the nose’ for books from the Amazon bookstore have been saving money and frustration by using our Kindles 'offline' with our own eBook collections for many years. And few of us would trust 'big tech' with any of our precious data to risk storing it in the cloud.

Fortunately, it has always been possible to get ebooks 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 installed (this usually happens automatically when you connect), you will be able to load eBook files directly into your Kindle's Documents directory. Once there it will be loaded into reader memory and idexed automatically.

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 the more widely-used .mobi format, before your Kindle will recognise them. You can, of course also still access anything you’ve already downloaded to the Kindle from Amazon. What you can’t do anymore is to browse your cloud-stored eBooks via wifi from your Kindle or buy more of them from the Amazon bookstore.

Is there any way of retrieving my Amazon cloud books and transferring them to my Kindle ? 

Although, as discussed, Amazon have stopped pc downloads, they are legally obliged to give you access to any books you've bought from them. You can still access these 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 to the device as a .azw file, which you would need to load it into 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 measures, and decide to block it.

It’s of note that by doing this, Amazon are effectively restricting access to ebooks that you as their customer have paid for from the device you bought them with – even though you can access paid-for books by other means, 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. Hopefully someone will - our 'big tech' behemoths have gotten 'far too big for their boots' in recent years, and definitely need taking down a peg...or six.

How should I best make use of my Kindle going forward ?

Firstly, don't just abandon it, or worse still, send it to join our ever-expanding e-waste mountain !

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. Why ? - if you de-register it, two things will happen: a) its memory will be cleared and b) you won’t be able to re-register it, or use it to access the books from the cloud.  Leaving it registered won’t affect your ability to side-load books, so unless you want a completely 'clean slate', don’t de-register. If you can, transfer any books you have in the cloud to your Kindle now, before the 20th May deadline hits.

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've acquired elsewhere and want to read on 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; it will also convert between formats as required. Managing your book collection in this way helps avoid cluttering up your Kindle’s reader memory with your complete book collection, most of which you may never get round to reading. You’ll also prolong your Kindle’s battery life – this is important because older Kindles use quite a bit of power indexing new books when they're first loaded; most of the older Kindles are now at least 15 years old, so their batteries need as much TLC as you can give them. You can also save battery power by switching off wifi permanently - it was only ever of any use for downloading Amazon books, and the 'experimental' browser as they so aptly call it is far too old to work with modern websites.

Once you're connected to Calibre, I'd recommend you copy any Amazon books already on the Kindle into your Calibre library for safe-keeping. You can then re-load them at a later date if required, e.g. if you do decide to de-register, or your Kindle locks up and needs resetting.

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

There are countless free eBooks available on the net nowadays from a multitude of sources. 

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. Publishers have lobbied for restirctions over the years, but repeated attempts by authorities have failed to stem the tide, which will continue until publishers acknowlege a new publishing model is required in the for the internet age. There is absolutely no need to go short of reading matter just because Amazon have cut your Kindle off  'in its prime'…and 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 if you've got this far, I’m a confirmed devotee of older Kindles, and have published several unofficial guides to the various models that have passed through my hands over the years. 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 – all of these devices are on the Amazon 'death list' and the guides will give you chapter and verse on how to set them up and transfer books to and from them independently of Amazon. They will also provide some other useful hints and tips on where to get free ebooks.

Feel free to contact me using the comments column in this blog if you need further advice.

Happy future Kindle-ing…..

First Published 11.4.26; revised 21.4.26

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