Software Jailbreak for Any Kindle | Hacker News Reader

Software Jailbreak for Any Kindle

mobileread.com

390 pointswoliveirajr171 comments

The Benefits of JailBreaking Your Kindle:

- Customize your lock screen to the recently opened book cover, selected image, or randomized from a collection of images. Amazon added something similar recently but it took them 13 years for something so basic.

- KOReader for reading epub and pdf. Also, you get access to the filesystem so you can organize your books however you want.

- Customizable collections (similar to folders) with Calibre

- Run Python so you can run w/e you want. Some ideas...

    - Sideload books via WiFi

    - Sync notes automatically

The main idea of Jailbreaking is that you own your device and you can do whatever you want with it. However, I switched from a Jailbroken Kindle Paperwhite to an Android e-ink reader about a year ago and I'm never looking back.

Regardless, I'm happy to see this on Hacker News!

What model of e-ink reader did you switch to?

Onyx Boox Poke 3. TBH it's a bit overpriced compared with Kindle Paperwhite which is what I had but the feature set is comparable to Kindle Oasis. More importantly, I wanted to be able to sync my books, highlights, and notes cross-platform. Uploading epub to Google Play Books lets me do this

I have the boox a4 size and the normal ipad size. I am not sure I like to read book on it. Kindle is better somehow. The problem is pdf is too small to over there. Hence the chinese phone home device.

Finally go back to Goodreader and even working copy (<20 MB only due to GitHub restriction) and Dropbox.

Read a lot of things and hence still struggle any old and responsive e-ink reader without phoning home.

Those devices are a bit too big for novels IMO. Reading with a two page spread on my Note Air isn't too bad but the device is still pretty heavy.

The 7.8" devices are IMO perfect book size and that's where I do most of my novel reading.

I've repeatedly asked for the lock screen to be the last page read. Then you can use it to display a reference page, or your daily schedule, or whatever.

You crazy bastard. As if that device is actually yours. What’s next, actual ownership of the files within?

To be fair the Kindle is the cheapest e-reader you can find. Amazon needs to recoup the cost somehow.

Why should we be fair to Amazon? I consistently read on this site about how bad they are as an employer, company, and a web store.

And then you went and bought their product?

I think it’s fair to complain about a company whose product you bought. I have both android phones and iphones and complain about the parent companies all the time. Same thing with Nike, P&G, J&J, and a handful of the other oversized American conglomerates.

We shouldn't. And ethical problems aside, a bad product is a bad product.

> and a web store

Weird. On of the reasons I use a kindle is how the web store is better and has more content and sales than alternatives like Indigo (who sells Kobo)

Amazon's desire to sell a device for less than it costs to make is not our problem. Computational disenfranchisement is wrong, and technical measures to create disenfranchisement should be considered contrary to the public good the same way as many other abusive relationships are.

Doesn’t Amazon make money on every single book purchased on the kindle?

I mean Amazon's model for the kindle is the equivalent of the maxim, "give away the razors so you can sell the blades".

A nice follow-up would then be to remove the “battery dead” screen. So if it dies, it’s at least stuck showing something useful forever.

... but will it allow me to turn my Kindle off?

I always upload books to the Kindle via wifi. You email the .mobi version to youremail@kindle.com, within a minute you will get a verify email, where you have to click the link, then the file gets pushed to your kindle. I'm too lazy to deal with wires and stuff.

MOBI is so outdated and lack many newer features on Kindle. So much so that Amazon is discontinuing sending mobi via email later this year.

Wait what? Is that just mobi? Or can other files be used. My USB port broke years ago so I soldered on a qi charger and now just send books over WiFi.

They support sending EPUB now.

You can still use other formats on your Kindle. That restriction is for publishing new books on Amazon store.

If you want to publish a new book on Amazon, you have to use EPUB instead of MOBI. That's the only change afaik.

No, this applied to Send to Kindle service too. Announced a few days ago.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

What are some of those missing new features when you use MOBI?

1. Can't choose custom fonts 2. Can't configure boldness

Maybe a few thing more, but these two are what put me off of using MOBI. (I believe there's a hack for jailbroken kindle to fix this)

That's too bad, the usb is broken on my old kindle, the experimental browser in it is too old to use to connect to the Calibre server feature and the only option I had left was sending mobi by mail. (It does not read epub) Can you think of any other solution ?

You'll be able to email Epub instead. You can already do it now actually if you send it as a ".zip" or ".PNG" but they reject ".Epub" outright. But they recently updated a support article saying send to Kindle will support Epub soon. Amazon converts it using their tools to their format that's right for the device.

Wait, do all Kindle models support epub reading ?

No none of them do. When you email an Epub file Amazon converts it using KindleGen to whatever your device supports.

Oh I did not know that thanks

Yeah the PNG trick works great. So great I don't understand they never made it official before

I used to do this but I realized how difficult it is to organize your books this way. Calibre → Kindle was a much better workflow in my experience.

You can also email epubs this way. You just have to rename them as .PNG because Amazon doesn't allow epubs. But if you trick it as PNG it forgets about this and converts it just fine.

Of course you can also convert with calibre but this method works well too.

Edit: oh apparently they support epub officially now. They didn't for a long time and the above workaround was great for years

In my experience, these jailbreaks only work a short window of time and are not easy to hold on to.

Amazon silently updates devices as soon as they patch CVEs. In most cases, you must keep the device in Airplane mode or somehow block OTA updates. [1]

You can not downgrade if you mess this up or do not catch your device before the CVE is patched. Presumably, they are blowing fuses, but I don't know.

So if you think you might want to jailbreak, find your device put it in airplane mode now!

I keep an Oasis in a spring-balanced arm anchored to my bed frame so I can read while I'm falling asleep. I finally finished the first Dune trilogy this year thanks to this.

The sole reason I previously jailbroke my Kindle was so I could use a wireless page turner.

The problem was that reaching out to touch the screen each page meant I had to get my arm out from under the covers which broke the otherwise sublime passive consumption of a book. More recently such motion had the potential to wake the baby I was holding.

I am not the only one who has wanted an official clicker from Amazon, people have expressed a desire for this on reddit and forums for many reasons including accessibility.

Since these jailbreaks come along infrequently, my initial idea was to build a physical screen tapper out of a solenoid. That ended up being too noisy and big.

I've investigated two jailbreak methods using software / hw combos:

- Kindlelazy, which uses a usb 2.0 micro usb male to usb female otg adapater and a presentation clicker

- Homekit Eve button -> Homebrew -> run ssh command on kindle over wifi

When the last jailbreak based on an RCE dropped in January of 2021, KindleDrip, [2] I rushed to attempt it and succeeded.

However, I made some mistake and the device updated. I was so bummed!

I kept my notes on these different methods with links to each repo or forum thread for the steps in a google doc. I just made a copy of it public, maybe it will help someone. [3]

To my great surprise in mid 2021, some company called SYUKUYU made a wireless Kindle page turner using a clip that does a light electrical pulse and a small hand held remote.

I bought it even though it had hardly any reviews and found it was amazing. Both parts use a USB-C connection to recharge and the thing works exactly as designed.

I just checked in on that product and it has 4.5 stars and 726 ratings now.

Parent mentioned Amazon took 13 years to add image covers. It isn't just that, Amazon has neglected the Kindle in many ways for many years.

From the default "special offers" behavior of Kindle, to the languishing, yet unavoidable Goodreads to the latent hardware improvements to their overpriced product line.

Amazon isn’t offering a native Bluetooth page turning device because the product lacks demand or it’s not feasible.

In my opinion its because the company doesn't care about its Kindle customers.

Amazon has a strong hold over ebooks due to its vertical integration of content, hardware and entrenched social platform of Goodreads.

The pandemic only pushed adoption of its DRM licensing scheme used by libraries or their service providers even further.

It was unexpected and welcome when they added the cover thing, but that came only after the last CVE was closed. Almost like they were waiting for a reason to need to appear like they were doing _anything_ for the product.

[1] https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=338268

[2] https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=336740

[3] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JIw5YCx-wlSetOWVgD-HAAiP...

Can you share the arm you use to hold the kindle? I’ve been on a quest for year to find one for my Kobo (which is much easier to “jailbreak” in the sense that you don’t need to because it’s not in jail, and the text layout engine is so much better compared to the kindle… very few rivers)

Sure. See below.

It isn’t super cheap and it isn’t great if you plan to take it out regularly.

I keep this oasis in this contraption all of the time. I have an old Paperwhite for camping in the desert etc.

(I did my jail breaking on the PW because by the time I got to my oasis it had already been updated.)

Here is the listing, I got this in Jan 2020, so can’t say if the current is cut from the same cloth.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07SDFFHSW/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_4V...

I got this very similar one recently, and it’s pretty good, using it with an iPad mini: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07P8YHKLF/

Also a Satechi R1 remote for page turning.

I also built a balanced arm for my (non-kindle) reader and wanted a remote page turner. I built one that uses a button and a reed relay to ground a piece of aluminum foil to the readers USB ground to stimulate a finger touch. It works but it's not very pretty. Forgot where I got the idea. My girlfriend has an Android reader, she can just use one of those tiny Bluetooth gamepads made for phones.

This is brilliant idea, thanks so much!

Do you please mind giving some info on how to build a balanced arm?

I built it on the principle of those balanced desk lamps (for example google 'Ikea Tertial'). I used wood instead of metal and elastic rope instead of the springs. The joints I 3d printed. You have to adjust the spring/elastic tension to fit with the weight at the end.

Do you have suggestions on how to use one of those Bluetooth game pads to scroll the screen and not just turn pages?

No, no idea. Try to google what "keys" those gamepads actually send?

I haven't tried this particular jailbreak procedure but when I did it 3 years ago, blocking the OTA updates was a part of the process.

I'm keeping my original Kindle Paperwhite in airplane mode for many, many years now because of that reason. I stopped even caring about checking whether an update would be still jailbreakable, I just don't update. It still works, it's still useful, but it's an offline reader.

This Kindle is what taught me to always think twice before I buy a device that doesn't really belong to me ;) It's just not worth my effort.

I wonder does jailbreaking have any implication on battery life? I'd hate to jailbreak my kindle for a very much reduced battery life

Unless you run some automation on it, it shouldn't affect the battery life. The difference was negligible for me

KOReader also gets you a host of features, including a real file browser, reading statistics (both on the book and calendar level), reading sync with other devices running KOReader, support for weirder formats (such as CBR/CBZ), better PDF formatting (PDF Reflow for reading papers is great), and Calibre Wireless access, and OPDS support.

And much more. KOReader runs on Linux as well, so you can do a trial run to see the UX and the vast feature set.

KOReader runs on everything under the sun, including Android. The UX is... good in some areas and very poor in others.

Not iOS

I use it on a Kobo and it's great. It has SSH too, and WebDav, so I can either scp files over from a computer (push) or open the network share and download them onto the device (pull).

No cables, no web services.

Dang, I think you just convinced me. The main benefit is I can run my own Python code...Damn the possibilities are literally limitless.

Amazon updates their own operating system like once every three years...The thought of finally being able to do what I want is very enticing.

I pretty much never use my kindle any more. Instead I use a Reading app on my android phone, usually in darkmode which I don't find tiring on my eyes.

> or randomized from a collection of images. Amazon added something similar recently

Just to be clear, you still can't do that (without jailbreak), right? You can set it to the cover of the book you're currently reading, but not to a collection of images of your choice.

I think grandparent meant 'Amazon added something similar recently...' ... to newly sold kindles.

I still don't think this feature exists, I can't find any reference of it online anywhere.

May I ask which Android e-ink reader you switched to?

Not OP but was in a similar situation sans jailbreak. I switched to a Boyue Likebook Mars which has android, micro SD card, headphone jack for audiobooks.

I installed koreader and synching so when I drag n drop ebooks or audiobooks into a certain folder, I know it will just magically appear there on the sd card of the e-reader in a few minutes.

I can still run and use the Kindle app for my existing library, though these days I buy only drm free ebooks as well.

So nice to actually own ones ebooks!

How did you install syncrhing. Granted im not deep into likebook but i love my mars reader. Syncthing would make it great.

Syncthing is available on android

Hows the battery life with syncthing? I found it pretty draining on my smartphone

I answered this in another comment :)

> Onyx Boox Poke 3. TBH it's a bit overpriced compared with Kindle Paperwhite which is what I had but the feature set is comparable to Kindle Oasis. More importantly, I wanted to be able to sync my books, highlights, and notes cross-platform. Uploading epub to Google Play Books lets me do this

Isn't it easier to get a Lenovo M10 X605F, put Ubuntu Touch on it and do whatever you want with it?

Not if you want e-ink

I had to jailbreak my kindle to fix the system time.

My kindle 2 (~2009) only has cellular connectivity (which doesn't work anymore) and even if it did the API it used for clock synchronization no longer exists.

Occasionally my kindle crashes or requires a hard reset and this resets my system time to epoch. So any new books I add via USB (or even any existing books I read) have their added/last read time in the past and it messes up book sorting.

Some day I'll write an init script to check if the system time is bogus and set some reasonable value from a log file's last access time or something. Until then I manually update it when it breaks via usbnetwork.

You could also write something like Linux's fakehwclock that writes device time to a file on shutdown and reads it on bootup. Your clock will skew more (shutdowns are supposedly 0 seconds in duration), but it would at least be monotonic.

Fakehwclock is cool for computers with no clock battery like raspberry pis. So you at least have a time from this century until clock sync

maybe we should also mention the downsides?

The downsides are your time spent into doing some research and jailbreaking, and the barrier to update the Kindle firmware freely. But I wouldn't worry about the last point because Amazon rarely adds useful features. As a reference, I didn't find the need to update the firmware while I had the Kindle from 2019-2021.

Thank you so much for this! I was considering of getting ipad just to read PDFs. I jailbroke my kindle last night. Now I am enjoying this awesome reader!!!

KOReader is brilliant. I sync my books with Syncthing and read them with KOReader.

KOReader (something you can install on a Jailbroken Kindle) is the best book reading app I have come across, in any platform.

PDF text reflow which the Kindle can't do out of the box is reason enough to be interested in KOReader. I also found support for DjVu format very useful, which is used for many old book scans on archive.org (while it's possible to convert this format, the resulting file sizes will be much larger).

Let over lambda is one of this. But you can find a good converter for pdf that work.

The IA DjVus are great. They are encoded with a background separation method called MRC (mixed raster content), and they used a proprietary compressor to do it.

The PDFs do the same thing, but they use JPEG2000, which is incredibly slow (10 seconds per page on an weedy ereader application processor).

Sadly, the IA stopped making DjVus years ago, so anything scanned recently is incredibly painful to read on a mobile device.

Nice. I'm still continually baffled that there isn't a bigger push for the following fundamental idea:

"Any human being can hold an effectively infinite library, which is to say infinite knowledge in their hand for about $100. Any barrier to this should be regarded as negative, if not straight up evil."

Don’t most people have access to the internet already with more information then they’ll consume? And many of us live where there are public libraries.

That’s a pretty weird/loose definition of evil. Isn’t it more if a “nice to have”?

How about the inverse, it should be regarded as evil to expect people to work for a pittance or free to provide you with cheap devices and unlimited libraries?

Got the idea in my head the other day that I should look into Kindle jailbreaking for my older Paperwhite 2. Was surprised to find there wasn't much of a scene, and no meaningful OS to install.

I'd absolutely love to read Twitter and other sites if they were formatted smartly for an e-ink device. An e-ink RSS reader would be a dream. I know there's a site out there that tries to be a hub/aggregator for reading some sites on the Kindle browser, but you have to type in the URL every time..

The Kindle browser is still experimental after a decade and has almost no features or real UX. All the JS out there probably killed the project.

> Was surprised to find there wasn't much of a scene, and no meaningful OS to install.

I wish Amazon would support officially jailbraking/installing alternative OS for the old kindles.

If they are not sold anymore, it would not lose them much while avoiding turning them into e-waste, thus gaining goodwill.

You can install Duokan on it. It's a dual-boot. Has EPUB and PDF support. Company has pulled support for it now, but if you install it anyway, you can still load your files locally.

I'm building a product[0] to do exactly what you're mentioning. It still requires you to push the content to your Kindle though

[0]: https://ktool.io

If I jailbreak, would I be able to install future firmware update releases from Amazon? Would it reverse the jailbreak?

Some releases are safe to upgrade to, needing no changes. A few need a small hotfix patch.

All upgrades will break apps, even if your jailbreak survives - but re-installing apps is a breeze.

And finally, a few releases might brick your jailbreak badly.

The guidance usually is to “Avoid upgrades, and check the forum thread when a new release is available to see the safe way to upgrade”.

Nice, would you mind sharing more info on the benefits of jailbraking it? Apart from gaining root access, is there an ecosystem to still view my saved books, pdfs, maybe even other programs / text formats ?

IIRC it means you can install the Play Store instead of just having Amazon's terrible Fire store.

But the Kindle doesn’t run either, I think you mean the fire tablets and not the e-readers?

Yep. This is for [e]Kindles. It's a screen reader that uses e-ink screens that save a lot of power and barely have any of that blue light that hurts your eyes.

It's just grey-scale colors.

Completely different from Fire Amazon tablets.

You're right I'm thinking of the Fire tablets. Allegedly if you jailbreak your Kindle you can manage your library and collections with Calibre.

You can manage your collection with Calibre (and at least used to auto-strip DRM in the process) without jailbreaking, I did that with the Kindle Keyboard many years ago.

The only thing I remember about jailbreaking, was being able to use custom screensavers and fonts.

I don't think you can strip DRM any more. At least I can't with my Kindle Paperwhite and Calibre.

You can still, but unless the libraries needed to do it are updated you'd need to use the last version of Calibre built on python2.

I didn't have any issues removing drm from my purchased amazon books as of a few months ago using the latest version of calibre released at the time and the latest version of the kindle for windows app.

No it doesn't. You can install the Google Play Store without jail breaking. I've installed the Play Store on 3 Fire tablets, and I've never done a jail break.

Instructions are on the android Police website. https://www.androidpolice.com/install-play-store-amazon-fire...

The Play Store is a great improvement, it has far more apps and newer versions than the Amazon app store.

one benefit is that it can allow you to read epubs which is the universal standard for books. the fact that they don't support epubs natively is like having a music player that doesn't support mp3's. the only reason they do it is for the sake of being anti-consumer and anti-competitive.

This sounds great, but still much more effort that dragging+dropping into an online epub->mobi converter and using the nice "email yourself a file" feature they support.

Also, epub support is coming and mobi is being deprecated https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/the-amazon-kindle-will-s...

At the end of that article:

> Update: It looks like Amazon is converting the uploaded EPUB to KF8 (AZW3). So, it looks like they might not support EPUB natively.

So I'm not holding my breath. Which is not to say Amazon couldn't add native EPUB support. KF8/AZW3[1] (Amazon's proprietary ebook format) is basically EPUB in a MOBI shell. But they're moving away from KF8 to KFX[2] for books purchased from the Amazon store.

[1] https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/KF8 [2] https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/KFX

> Which is not to say Amazon couldn't add native EPUB support.

They've had it in the past; I know there have been Kindle models that included a web browser. Is that gone?

They still have a web browser but a web browser is not the same as EPUB support. No Kindle has ever supported epub natively.

> but a web browser is not the same as EPUB support

But a web browser is the same as epub support. If you have a web browser, you have epub support, because rendering HTML is all there is to supporting epub. An epub is nothing but a set of HTML documents.

No it isn't. There's more to Epub than HTML and web browsers don't know by default how deal with the files or handle things like pagination or the table of contents. Mobi is also based on HTML too. Doesn't mean every web browser supports mobi either.

> and web browsers don't know by default how deal with the files or handle things like pagination or the table of contents.

So? Safari and Chrome don't know by default how to handle pagination of documents. (Actually, they do; they handle it by scrolling.) But any browser that exists on a Kindle does. If you can use it to read a web page, you can also use it to read an epub.

I had to load a Firefox extension[0] to read ePub. I don’t think it can read them without it.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/epubreader/

Sure; the book is a website, not a webpage. The harness has to do three things:

1. Unzip the file.

2. Display the content root.

3. Handle the implicit transition from one chapter to the next.

All of the work involved here is in step 2, writing the web renderer.

Calibre automatically converts everything though. I'm sure there are some edge cases where the conversion isn't perfect, but how are you managing your Kindle where you'd care that the original file is an epub?

It's a mass storage device. You should be able to plug it in and copy files as normal.

i shouldn't be required to convert my books to a proprietary format in order to read them. i also have some epubs that have issues when being converted to mobi or azw3. issues as in they can't be read on the kindle after being converted even though they are read just fine in calibre. if they would just support epub then this wouldn't be an issue.

They are adding epub support this year https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/the-amazon-kindle-will-s...

the article you linked to literally says that's not the case. the way it works is that you upload your epubs to amazon and then they convert them from epub to azw3 for you and then allows you to download them to your device. not only is this a rube goldberg machine that doesn't support epub, it's been unofficially possible for years already by changing the extension from epub to png to trick it into thinking it isn't an epub when it is.

One important caveat in the article:

> Update: It looks like Amazon is converting the uploaded EPUB to KF8 (AZW3). So, it looks like they might not support EPUB natively.

The problem is that many PDF's are simply a bunch of scanned images. And these can't be readily converted to any text based format.

The exception is to put the PDF through an OCR process, but this destroys the formatting and can't deal with images. The whole point of my scanning these old books was to keep the historical information.

I have hundreds of old books I have scanned and converted to PDF, but I cant read these on a Kindle.

what did you use to scan them? did you have to remove the binding?

I have various book scanners. eg a Plustek Optibook 3600 which has done an incredible amount of work.

Plus I've built a dual camera book scanner similar to https://www.diybookscanner.org/

And where necessary I have access to commercial high-speed duplex scanners which do require that the spine be cut. OK for old magazines, etc.

Jailbreaking allows installing custom reader apps like KOReader (https://koreader.rocks/). KOReader has lots of nice features, including top-notch EPUB support, Wallabag integration, a PDF reader that can do reflow with k2pdfopt (https://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/), and generally lots of ways to customize the reading experience. I don't have a jailbroken Kindle but I love it on my Kobo

You can create app's on them, either native apps built for armv7 (and an old version of glibc), or create a 'kindlet' (java app made for kindles, using java 1.4 (or 1.5 if you compile it down to 1.4))

https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindlet_Developer_HowTo https://cowlark.com/kindle/getting-started.html

At my current job, I made an app for the older Kindle 4, as a way to replace paper pick lists. It ends up being both cheaper then paper + ink and more convenient. It's also a nice way to recycle old/unused kindles.

Hm, my Kindle is in Airplane mode since I bought it 7 years ago.

So this should work wonderfully

Same here! I actually had to manually update the firmware to a supported version by this jailbreak and did it.

Same here since i bought the Oasis, now i can finally get proper dictionaries on it...

Or you could buy a non-amazon reader instead.

I am very happy with my rakuten Kobo Libra 2. USB-C. epub. Pocket.

No amazon lock-in or silly ads.

Lots of good stuff from the PineNote project as well. We might get a default free userspace for e-paper devices.

Thanks for sharing this one. Not going to preorder since I have no interest in fiddling with it but looks like something I would buy the minute it's ready. Pine64 kind of need more funding. Not too much, though

> Or you could buy a non-amazon reader instead.

> I am very happy with my rakuten Kobo Libra 2. USB-C. epub. Pocket.

This assume that these readers are widely available. In my country (and many others), the only reader officially sold (i.e., with local warranty) is kindle. Even if I were willing to forgo the warranty, the import taxes would be ridiculous, making it prohibitive at best.

This is amazing news for many of us.

I also bought the Libra 2 and it's hands down the best electronics purchase I've made in years. So light and comfortable.

Tablets should come in this amazing form factor, just like the olden days. Screw this 16:9 nonsense.

I wish it had some kind of support, though. Or a hover technology. Holo projectors can't come soon enough so that our hands and eyes can be free and comfy

It's atrocious that you have to jump through such hoops just to get control over a device you own.

Is it possible to replace the batteries on the early kindles and Paperwhites? The devices work fine except they die really fast.

They are quite easy to change if you know your way around a screwdriver. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Kindle+Paperwhite+1st+Generatio...

Yes, I've done it myself.

I bought a replacement battery for my early kindle from aliexpress for a very cheap price. I did need a hairdryer to heat the glued back and a proper plastic spudger would have been helpful. I believe I used the iFixit guides.

I have a kindle paper white 2 with KOReader and love it. Has anyone had an issue that whenever you connect to the network KOReader sets the time to UTC? Has anyone figured out a fix. I have to manually set the time every time I do a wireless Calibre sync. Bit of a pain.

> Once the demo is setup, skip the misconfiguration lockout using the "secret gesture" (double finger tap on bottom right of screen then swipe left)

The last Kindle I owned (and cracked) didn't have a touch screen. I feel old now...

The Kindle/E-Reader development community is a great one. It's so cool that development keeps continuing to provide better and better jailbreaks.

Pretty cool for me. I was looking to use the kindle for a dashboard for some metrics. I really want it to start up and "just work" and not have to mess with the browser every time.

I like the idea of framing an eInk display on the wall, but don't want to buy one when I have unused Kindles.

Between this, some stuff I wandered into there, and a raspberry pi or whatever, it looks totally doable. May fall back to a TUI, but whatever.

Is there some way we can do this:

Bundle web articles I save as an ebook and send them to my Kindle. When I save new articles, that old book is updated on my Kindle - basically an append-only service.

I've been looking for this for a while, but don't find an easy way to update an existing book to append more pages to it. Any pointers are welcome, I'm willing to implement it.

I think you cannot do it wirelessly (for a non-jailbroken device). If you connect with an USB cable, I think we can achieve it by removing the old file and replace it with a new one.

But I'm curious, why not creating new book every time?

Or if you don't want to read all of those articles yet, why not send it at some later time?

The problem with replacing books is that I would lose my older highlights.

If I create a new book for everything, it would become messy _really_ quickly.

So if it's possible to append pages to a book, I can also create a book per category and append pages as I save articles.

Ah I gotcha. I'm building a product[0] for non-jailbroken Kindles and would love to solve new problems.

In your case, if I can backup your highlights (and notes) to somewhere else, does that solve your problem? You can choose your storage service (dropbox, notion, s3 etc.)

[0]: https://ktool.io

Yeah that would be nice, could try it out. But I'm fickle - before putting that effort in, ask more of your users! Also, a table of contents with all the articles in the book would be nifty.

Maybe you can send me an email once you do it, I can try it out (I'll use the chat on the website to send my email). Also, just a heads-up: the 50$ seems like a but too much. For context, I bought my Kindle itself for ~40$ (India)

I didn't try out the preview thing the first time since setting up the email is too much of a hassle (didn't know it would dynamically preview). But I typed in an article url anyway to see what would happen anyway, and I LOVE the kindle preview. I think it's brilliant!

All the best!

Looks pretty awesome, kudos!

If i may offer some feedback, demo screens from the app/website, and some example sources outside of Twitter ( e.g. i wanted to know if it's capable of reading RSS feeds) might be useful additions to your site.

I wish i knew about it before buying an Onyx Boox Nova Air to replace my Kindle for that particular use case ( news reading, mostly through my RSS reader which is web-based).

Thanks for your valuable feedback.

Yeah you’re right, my landing page is not very good at the moment. I’m in the process of improving it :-)

Not exactly what you’re asking for, but I’ve used https://p2k.co for many years and it’s great.

I used to print web pages out and read them on the train, then there was a lovely web plugin to send a web page to kindle, that stopped and did leave lots of files on my kindle.

This looks like it could top that, I just don’t commute so much.

Kobo eReaders come with support for syncing articles from Pocket out-of-the-box.

This isn't everything you want, but it does bundle the articles. It just doesn't have the "append" feature: https://epub.press

I have made a quick-and-dirty script to save a website to an epub file: https://gist.github.com/solarkraft/2941ccf11a7aac5ebac3d173f...

Postlight's Mercury Parser can parse most websites. I likely wouldn't use nodepub again because you can't save books without a cover image; it's easy enough to just package the epub yourself (just a zip file with some XHTML).

You can sync the file over with any armv6 Linux capable app; an old version of Syncthing works just fine.

Hmm, I should go pick up a Kindle…does anyone know how the device compatibility list works? I don't see the newer models in it?

You can jailbreak old Kindles (out of software updates) even more easily. Old Touch Kindles are getting dirt cheap and are still perfectly capable.

This is great. I recently got a new KT4 running 5.14.1 which didn’t have a working jailbreak at the time.

I know what I’m doing with my Sunday. ;)

Now what if they patched it and sent an upgrade. I am away from home and I'm afraid my Kindle will update on its own and then I'll never be able to jailbrake it. I had already tried once.

Could you ask someone at home to put it in airplaine mode for you?

Totally forgot about this. No one was at home over weekend

Anyways checked my Kindle after reading these replies. Turns out it was all drained out of charge. After waking it up, I put it in Airplane mode and checked the version to find out it is stuck at Oct 2021. I'm going to jailbreak it:)

My Kindle has been on airplane mode from the second I unboxed it and turned it on -- waiting for this very moment. But yes, get someone to put it on airplane mode?

Totally forgot about this. No one was at home over weekend

Thanks to this post, was able to jailbreak my oasis 3, struggling in understanding jargons to get koreader working.

TLDR; Had to install MRPI first (extension of KUAL), simply by extracting it into kindle's root, and keeping KUAL (coplate's patch) in mrpackages, original KUAL didn't show up. Then simply following koreaders guide.

It's a rabbit hole. a) https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_Touch_Hacking b) https://github.com/zaoqi/kual-linuxdeploy-armhf/

What are the advantages and disadvantages of a jailbroken Kindle compared to one with the official firmware?

I had a debian chroot on mine. The official firmware is just running awesome WM on X11 so you can run normal arm Linux software pretty easily.

Nice! Seems like a nice-to-have tablet! Does the framerate suck? My mom sometimes uses it to read digital books, but she's kind of tired of having to buy 'official' books through the kindle store, sign in, wait for it to connect to the internet.

(for educational purposes only, do not try at home)

You can download books and send them via email to your Kindle. I do this all the time (with only free books, of course ;) )

Or you can use Calibre to get around the size limitations of email.

The framerate was surprisingly good. Plenty for text editing and IRC.

I'm stuck at step 8. I can't seem to get the ``secret gesture'' to work, and it says `This demonstration device is either missing content or is disconnected from the network | CONFIGURE DEVIE'' and responds to nothing.

OK, that gesture was really hard to do.

Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JzuIGbGPpig

I wonder how the jailbreak works; is this a Linux kernel exploit or?

The three linked CVEs are still in "reserved" status, and I presume that's related to the first line of TFA

> ... full writeup with technical details to be released after 5.14.3 has been widely rolled out.

I don't own a kindle in order to have more in the weeds to offer

Is there a way to check whether the jailbreak was successful? I followed all the steps, I think, but see no indication of success.

You should have received a brief screen saying the jailbreak is being installed in one of the steps.

Just thank you <3

Can I use this to remove the ads from the lock screen? Or is there any other method that does not involve jailbreaking?

Removing the ads from the filesystem using a computer and keeping the kindle in airplane mode does the trick but I really liked the feature of sending books by mail.

Just try asking Amazon support. Usually it's a person from India that doesn't care and will remove them without asking.

rm -r /Volumes/Kindle/system/.assets

Then

touch /Volumes/Kindle/system/.assets

I tried it but it only worked for couples of days

Got it from the script https://github.com/mariopepe/KindleAdRemover/blob/master/Kin...

Will jaibreaked Kindle allow copying text and share it from sideloaded books?

Currently, kindle only allows copying and sharing from the amazon purchased books and not from the sideloaded books.

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