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Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

I have quite often seen people here and on other tech forums assume that purchasing a Kindle means being locked into Amazon's ecosystem, giving up personal details, and having the risk that your books might be deleted. But you don't have to use the Kindle's internet connectivity: I have owned three generations of Kindle, and with each one I activated airplane mode the second I unboxed the device and I never turned airplane mode off. All my ebooks come from sources other than Amazon (mainly LibGen, for example), and they can be easily transferred over to the Kindle by USB because the Kindle appears as any ordinary USB drive to a computer.

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If this practice ever get wide spread I would guess that the developers will limit airplane mode in someway in order to ensure that the device will call home at some point.

But it is a pretty clever hack to get a hostile machine to not connect to the internet as airplane mode is (I assume) regulated behavior.

Even if the developers take the egregious step of nerfing airplane mode, you can still "opt out" by not giving the device credentials for your WiFi network.

Only a matter of time before devices come with 5G data connections...

...which would require a valid SIM. So just don't add one. If the device comes with a pre-inserted/hardwired/virtual SIM, well... several countries in the world require KYC-style registration of the SIM owner before networks are allowed to activate the SIM, so there'd still be an opt-out path for the user in such countries.

eta: My point being: Now you're in a twisty little maze full of corner cases, all different. Not the sort of thing much loved by Amazon (or any of the GRAFT).

Does this work with Teslas?

FWIW, the original kindle used a cellular connection to do position syncing and book downloading. No user-provided SIM needed.

Not in the IoT world. The 'owner' of the Sim, the company that sells the device, would have a deal with one or more network providers to allow access, and take care of facilitating data retention and identification regulation.

AKA, the original whispersync.

Yup, this was once a thing - you didn't need wifi for sync or downloading books at all.

Kindles at one point apparently came with free cellular access

https://xkcd.com/548/

I had a kindle keyboard and it had 3g. It worked in a bunch of countries--slowly though. I remember reading blogs where people were taking the sim cards out and tethering using them.

They still do - it's an option on more expensive devices (Paperwhite and Oasis).

To save money they could come with LoRA radios and sync when the opportunity arrises to a LoRA gateway, including meshing with each other to aggregate data to increase the likeliness of encountering a gateway. LoRA modules are pretty cheap.

https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/

Only until you come into range of any open WiFi which is every public place everywhere

Is that Kindle that promiscuous that it will literally connect to any open AP without prompting?

Here on hn, I read several stories where smart TVs did exactly that: they tried all available wifi networks to see if one of them worked.

It doesn't seem so far-fetched that the Kindle might, too.

Sure, but I'm looking for an answer and not idle speculation.

As of my current device (the Oasis), no, it does not appear to be this promiscuous. I can't speak to the analytics, but the whispersync and book downloading doesn't work unless you explicitly connect it to an AP.

Parent comment was

> if the developers take the egregious step of nerfing airplane mode,

and I was responding that IF the developers decide to nerf the airplane mode it's very possible they will start using any open AP; some TV's are reportedly doing this already

Ok so you don't know, you're just speculating without evidence.

No, the entire scenario is a hypothetical, the standard of evidence is inapplicable.

I don't understand the point then.

Literally any device you own with WiFi could be updated tomorrow to connect to any open access point.

I don't think they can - if they do this, Kindle would not be allowed in airplane cabin.

You're allowed to use WiFi on planes (other than take-off and landing, currently) and Aeroplane Mode often allows WiFi and Bluetooth these days. The rules are changing pretty fast.

I have also owned three generations of Kindle! Like you, I've never taken any of them online.

Never supply a wifi connection during setup, and instead immediately engage airplane mode. USB transfer is easy with something like Calibre, which also handily converts ePub to Mobi for Kindle use.

It used to be that you could buy Kindle books and download them to your computer for transfer to the Kindle via USB, but they seem to have made that more difficult in the last year or two. Other sources still work fine, though.

I tried to do this with a recent paperwhite but some features seemed to require registration - the main one I cared about being "collections". Had to make a fresh amazon account, register it, then put it into aeroplane mode never to be reconnected.

Hmm, maybe that's why collections doesn't work for me. I might enable wifi for a bit if that will help.

Same here (sans the Kindle). All eBook readers I have bought have never been connected to a WiFi network. If I want to change the books, i do it via USB.

That fact that Amazon collects these very detailed metrics has been well known for a long time. You will find old discussions in the MobileRead forum. Here is a thread from 2013 "Block Big Brother":

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=205224

> I activated airplane mode the second I unboxed the device and I never turned airplane mode off.

Same, however I had to connect my Kindle Oasis to the internet 1 time after purchase though, if i remember correct it was to download the dictionaries (for translation) i needed. And i think there was a feature that was missing until i connected it to the internet once (i used a new/temporary account for that) but can't remember what feature that was though.

You could have got those dictionaries from a filesharing community and simply copied them over to the Kindle via USB. No need to connect the Kindle to internet.

Yea, I tried that first but all the dictionaries i downloaded didn't work on my device for some reason, so in the end i gave up...

Why buy a kindle at all then?

Any cheap budget tablet can read ebooks and stay off the internet.

Any cheap budget table isn't e-ink, which matters for battery life and, at least for some people, reading pleasure. Also, I mainly use my Kindle for reading research papers in academia, into the hundreds of publications each year. So, after years of using these devices its UI (which I find admirably simple and straightforward) is burned into my muscle memory. So, switching to another series of devices would mean having to adjust to a new workflow that may well bring unwelcome complexities.

Do you have any tips for reading papers on Kindle? My experience with pdfs is they get pretty shrunk up.

There are many cheap e-ink readers on the market these days, though.

I've never seen one that has the bang for the buck of a basic paperwhite. I got my last one for under $100 and I never use the amazon nonsense. I just keep it in airplane mode and load my own books.

eInk is a lot nicer for reading books than LCD screens.

The downside is that eInk currently only supports black-and-white and turning pages is roughly only as fast as turning the page of a book.

Also, battery life is counted in days (and sometimes weeks) and not in hours.

> The downside is that eInk currently only supports black-and-white

E-ink Kaleido with 4096 colors at 100 ppi are available commercially since past few weeks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqiCOheb1jo

Those are really neat, the big issue is they’re still pretty low saturation so the images don’t look as good as an actual LED/LCD screen.

Thank you! I did not know about this. This is a really cool development. Even if the saturation (as mentioned by rtkwe) is not the greatest, this is a big step towards reading more analytical texts with colored graphs.

The new Kindle Oasis is incredibly fast on page turns - feels almost instant coming from a Paperwhite

One reason is value. They produce so many, the quality is decent and the price is subsidized so it's artificially low.

Why is it subsidized? Obviously to make it more fun to buy books, but also collecting valuable data on your reading habits. Obviously they know _what_ you're reading but it seems useful to them also to know what you bookmark etc.

They also have all the hardware they need for location history tracking by remembering wifi broadcasts seen. Is it known if that's being uploaded?

For people who read a lot, it makes sense to purchase device that is optimized for reading.

E-ink gives you Better screen for text, a lot better battery life, no apps, no notifications, no video ads, o ads in general, nothing flashy.

And kindles are relatively cheap, and available almost everywhere.

Kindle is just a great reading device. The only feature that I _might_ consider using that requires connectivity is the Wikipedia lookup, and the verdict so far is that Airplane mode is more valuable than that.

I haven't seen any cheap budget tablet that even comes close to the quality of a Kindle Paperwhite for reading.

There's also Kindle competitors, like the Kobo. You can also bet that if this becomes a wide-spread concern, another e-ink reader may come to market that offers privacy and security, maybe some sort of open-source, secure-by-default, ereader. Some attempts at this have already been made [1], but its not clear how strong the market demand for that is and if it will be successful. If you really want a privacy-centered reading experience, the easiest way to do this is just borrow the printed book from your local library.

[1]: https://hackaday.io/project/168761-the-open-book-feather

Kindle is easily the cheapest and most functional reading device out there.

Same, although I just have the one old Kindle that I revived with a new battery. It's never had a network connection since I factory reset it. I just dump ebooks onto it via USB. It might be recording all sorts of analytics but I don't care because it'll never be connected to the outside world.

Plus, for all the people saying basically "it's for your own good", the battery lasts much longer on aeroplane mode. For this device, for me, WiFi is an anti-feature.

What formats does it handle? Can it handle EPUB for example?

There are online converters for it all, the process is a little annoying but works fine and you can do it locally too with various tools:

https://www.epubconverter.com/epub-to-mobi-converter/

The Kindle handles .mobi and .azw3. It is trivial to convert EPUB to MOBI before you send the book to the device over USB (it can even be done as part of a command-line script, for example).

Having to deal with the .epub conversion was the main reason I ditched my Voyage and got a Kobo Aura One instead.

Why ditch a device just for that reason? Again, the OP assumes that one will transfer books to the device over USB for privacy’s sake. In this case, creating a shell wrapper around cp to automatically convert any EPUB to MOBI upon copying the file (naming the command, say, kindlecp) is trivial.

Conversion can occasionally barf and completely screw up the formatting. It's annoying to have to go back and re-convert with different settings for a problem that's non-existent when native support exists.

Loading books using programs like calibre [1] allows you to covert EPUB to MOBI (the kindle format) seamlessly before transferring. In my experience this works perfectly.

[1] https://calibre-ebook.com/

No it cannot. It only supports Amazon's proprietary ebook formats: AZW and MOBI. I love the paperwhite, but the limited format support led me to choose a different ereader when I last bought a new one.

Edit: I know I could convert between formats, but that process is not always perfect and can lose important formatting.

For this I recommend Calibre: https://calibre-ebook.com/

It will convert any format of E-Book to a compatible format for the Kindle (usually MOBI) and allows you to upload it directly. I use it often and it's an amazing piece of software!

I actually prefer KindleGen[0] to convert EPUB to MOBI - I find it produces a superior e-book.

Edit: Oh no, Amazon removed KindleGen! When did that happen? I still have x86 copies for Linux and windows if anyone wants it. Supposedly "Kindle Previewer" can do the same thing, but a cursory glance looks like it no longer supports Linux...

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000765...

> Edit: Oh no, Amazon removed KindleGen! When did that happen?

We know where this is going, don't we? Offering interoperability in the beginning and then gradually taking it away - the old bait and switch trick. We consumers fall for it again and again.

It's replaced with Kindle Create: https://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Create/b?ie=UTF8&node=18292298...

Again though, KindleGen had Linux support, it looks like this doesn't...

Damn, they removed KindleGen?! What a bummer!

Aghh, I have (had?) a project that relied on downloading kindlegen as part of the CI/CD step. I just downloaded it from Amazon each time.

I doubt I have a copy of it somewhere. Does anyone have / know of a copy of kindlegen for Linux anywhere?

Edit: Wayback machine has it, thank god. Had a very real sense of loss there. Unsure why it's a project I've hardly touched for years. https://github.com/wjdp/gotdict for the interested.

It works pretty well except for the latest generation of Kindle DRM. AFAIK, it hasn't been cracked yet. There are workarounds but the workaround result in a lower quality book.

I second that, I have older Paper Kindle with only wifi. And I never connect to wifi, Calibre is excellent for managing kindle archive without amazon's breathing down my neck.

Highly recommend.

I now do the same. I never take it off airplane mode unless I send a PDF or something to the device.

Same here - I only take mine off airplane mode when I am sending a library book to it, leaving wifi on eats through the battery significantly faster.

I just tend to use non-Kindle applications/devices for this. It's always been extremely easy to get non-DRM ebooks into Apple's book reading app (formerly iBooks, now just Books, in Apple's ongoing quest to make most of their application names as boring as possible). Perhaps ironically this makes Books the "non-walled-garden" app for me.

The pitfall in all this, though, is that there are a lot of commercial books that are only available from publishers that use DRM, and personally I don't consider DRM a sufficient justification for piracy -- so that leaves me stuck with locked books regardless. Lately I've been buying them from Apple rather than Amazon, although if I actually jump through whatever hoops are required to set up DRM stripping with Calibre for Kindle books, assuming that's still possible, I may switch back.

Would you agree that your usage pattern of the device is very atypical? I suspect (no hard evidence) tat 99% of Kindle purchasers use them primarily to read Amazon Kindle books.

Not sure about Kindle, but iPhone and Apple watch collect your location history even in airplane mode (by saving the list of wi-fi access points):

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207056, see "Significant locations"

That document doesn't mention anything about Airplane mode at all. Nor does it describe the Significant Locations feature as "saving the list of wifi access points"; in fact, I'm fairly sure that's not what they're talking about, and instead they're talking about the feature iOS uses to determine that you tend to go to the same place for lunch on Tuesdays or the same friend's house on Saturday afternoons and offer that as a Siri suggestion -- which is almost certainly GPS-based.

Last but not least, Significant Locations data is not just described as "end-to-end encrypted and cannot be read by Apple", it's clearly in the list of items under "By enabling Location Services, location-based system services such as these will also be enabled": e.g., if you're really, really bothered by this, you can turn it off.

Yes, this document does not tell how and when exactly it works. I took an Apple Watch and tested it myself before writing this.

Even if you trust that Apple does not use it for anything else, you cannot check this (no source code) and you cannot be sure that they won’t start using it in the future.

Opt-out tracking is not ethical. It should be opt-in.

I never turn off airplane mode, so my Kindle can collect all the data it likes! :)

Does the dictionary feature still work? It's the main reason I bought a Kindle.

The dictionaries are stored offline and will work fine in airplane mode. Wikipedia won't, though.

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