Hacker News Reader

Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

I've got a 3rd generation Kindle. It's over a decade old, but it works flawlessly except that it can't authenticate with Amazon anymore, due to changes in their whatsits. So, it's not possible for me to legally buy books from them, which (according to me) gives me license to just pirate everything I want. Nobody will believe this, but I do buy physical copies of about 90% of the books I steal, if only used copies. But Amazon doesn't get a dime from me anymore.

I bring this up to mention how incredibly easy it is to sideload books into a Kindle (an old one at least; can't speak to the new ones).

View on HN

Bookshop.org sells ebooks now. There is DRM based on publisher specifications unfortunately. For DRM free books, I ship physical copies for scanning to get a PDF, which is not great unfortunately.

https://bookshop.org/info/ebooks

IMO this is worse because the DRM books are limited to their app, and so completely locked away in their control. No possibility of reading on eink devices.

Depends on how hard it is to strip the DRM. It’s a checkbox to give publishers the warm and fuzzy feeling.

>We are working with Kobo to support Kobo devices later this year.

If that comes together I assume it'll use the standard adobe system and people can free their copies?

> So, it's not possible for me to legally buy books from them

Lol of course it is, you just convinced yourself that stealing was a better option.

Get on with Amazon support and tell them that you’ve been a loyal customer for a decade and have a Kindle that no longer authenticates but want to continue buying books from them.

If they don’t offer you a free Kindle, tell them you want one for free. I’ve done this a few times successfully when a Kindle broke outside of the warranty period.

This is insane... we should not be throwing away good tech because of planned obsolescence and relying on groveling to customer service to use tech that we bought...

OK, then just buy a new Kindle if you feel groveling is beneath you? I’ll admit that’s an even quicker solution.

Just glossed right over that e-waste part, eh?

yes, just like everyone does lol. people only bring up e-waste when they’ve run out of real points to make.

The save-the-environment ship has sailed. It’s not even a point worth engaging with. You really think that if every kindle ever made would magically last forever that the environment still wouldn’t be fucked beyond belief?

Defeatism is gross.

We can all of us individually, and all of us collectively, do better.

You are quite literally the problem.

We are all quite literally the problem.

Whatever helps you sleep at night.

Lol I sleep fine at night.

I don’t eat meat, I live in a small apartment, I don’t drive, I don’t fly, I don’t have kids. I buy crap I don’t need though.

I’ll put myself up against nearly anyone else in the developed world as far as carbon footprint goes.

E-waste, monetary waste (all this work in a good product-- only to be actively destroyed so that you have to buy a new one!), customer rights (it wouldn't be legal for someone to break your item with a hammer, so why with code?), and also just generally monopolistic anti-competitive market manipulation (this wouldn't fly in any competitive sector!)

We, as consumers, have a right to be mad about this stuff... this is why we have the Consumer Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission.

>When companies fuck you over you should keep buying from them

Yea this is dumb advice. Are you a stock holder?

How is it being fucked over if I pay for something and get value from it? I’m not entitled to my Kindle working forever just because I bought it today.

>I’m not entitled to my Kindle working forever just because I bought it today.

Yes you are. This is how it worked for nearly all of history. Its the entire point of the right to repair movement, to prevent companies from this scummy model of demanding a subscription for everything and trying to stop people from owning anything. Buying a Kindle over and over again benefits no one but Amazon and their stock holders. Its even more disgusting that the OP's Kindle broke because Amazon broke it on purpose.

> This is how it worked for nearly all of history

I don’t see you saying this about how we used to die if we got an infection.

Times change.

> Buying a Kindle over and over again benefits no one but Amazon and their stock holders.

It benefits me! The kindle I bought last year is many times more enjoyable to use than the one I bought a decade ago.

>The kindle I bought last year is many times more enjoyable to use than the one I bought a decade ago.

I know you're trolling, but in what way? Ebooks were always light, the only meaningful innovations have been sort of having color, getting bigger, and a stylus. Those are legitimate reasons to upgrades, everything else is software that could be updated.

>Times change.

People being in abusive relationships and thinking its good for them have existed forever. See how I didn't bring up something completely irrelevant to the conversation to make a point.

> I know you're trolling, but in what way

No, I am not trolling.

It is faster to turn pages, it has more storage, the screen is better, it has a light. If you want to include the scribe, it has a much bigger screen and I can write/draw on it.

It’s like your computer or phone. Would you really be thrilled to be using the 2015 version of those things today?

Begging for free things is not a solution to this problem, we should stop allowing corporations to break our things.

OK, you fight the corporations and I’ll just get a new Kindle.

No, it's really not possible anymore. Even if you upgrade the firmware as far as possible, which I've done, you still can't log into the Kindle store on the device. For a while there was a trick you could do involving requesting a one-time password, but even that just doesn't work anymore, even on devices newer than mine. They stopped supporting the device, end of story.

Reread my comment.

The part about asking for a free Kindle?

The changes to their whatsits are likely certificate expiration related.

For the longest time the rumor was that backward compatibility was mandated (through certificate gymnastics) by Jeff because Mackenzie had a 1st gen Kindle that she adored. I reckon nobody any longer gives a shit about that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com