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Comment by johngossman | Hacker News Reader

I can understand why one would want to move from Kindle to another device, but this article starts by complaining that support is being dropped for devices from before 2013. I can even understand being upset by this, but I have absolutely no faith that whatever other device I switch to will still be supported in 10+ years. Could be. But I sure wouldn't count on it.

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Usually an unsupported device stops getting new functionality and security fixes. The unsupported Kindles lose existing functionality, i.e. the ability to add books. Not quite bricked unlike, say, Sonos, but you are limited to the books y already downloaded to them.

This is inherent to DRM, and the reason why I would never have considered buying one in the first place. The eReader I have is a PocketBook Versa. Same price as a Kindle, extensible using microSD and I can add my non-DRM books however I want. Fortunately, Apple Books ePub FairPlay DRM is fairly easy to remove, so that's where I buy them.

Wait, wut? How would they stop me from adding new book to my kindle? I can just plug into USB and load directly right?

Well, I don't have a Kindle, so I can't verify this, but I am basing this from reporting:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98k91yy4z4o

"The move will mean owners of older Kindles, including its earliest models such as the Kindle Touch and some Kindle Fire tablets, will be unable to download new e-books."

For a more tech-oriented site, according to Ars Technica Amazon removed the ability to upload over USB:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/starting-in-may-pre-...

"Previously, owners of old Kindles could have worked around this loss of functionality by downloading books locally and transferring them via USB. But Amazon removed the ability to download books to a PC or Mac in February of 2025."

I don't like to brag "I told you so" but I saw this coming 16 years ago:

https://blog.majid.info/why-i-will-never-buy-a-kindle/

Nothing you've quoted is wrong per se, but it's also not the full story.

Amazon removed the ability to download files from them to your computer. And they will soon be removing the ability to download files from them directly to older kindle devices. You can still download a MOBI or EPUB from anywhere else online (though I think some older kindles don't support EPUB) and transfer it via USB, and will still be able to after they EOL those older devices.

Interesting. Once again, I don't have a Kindle so I can't verify any of this. I do have a PocketBook Versa with stock firmware and a M5Stack Paper S3 running Crosspoint Reader, but hardly use either as I prefer reading on LCD or OLED tablets. The only formats I care about are DRM-free ePub and PDF.

Totally fair. I don't read much on Kindles either (mostly on my OLED phone). There's just a lot of dis/misinformation around these deprecations that I feel should be corrected. I worked on Kindles earlier in my career and still have a soft spot in my heart for them.

Even new Kindles don't support EPUB, per-se. The Send-to-Kindle service started supporting EPUB, and converts them to AZW3 or KFX for actual delivery to your Kindle.

But you cannot just USB an EPUB onto your Kindle without any conversion process. (Calibre does make it very simple, though.)

Does anyone know if the send to kindle getting sunsetted as well?

Among other things, if you become logged out of the device or it's reset you will no longer be able to login with an amazon account ( which is required ) to use the device

You can use the Kindle without an Amazon account if you're fine with loading all your books over USB. It will give you a nag pop-up telling you to log in each time you go to the main menu, but the pop-up doesn't show up while you're in a book so it's not a big deal.

What is your point? That's still a major loss of functionality.

I’ve owned three Kindles and never used an Amazon account on any of them.

Often big company drm software to read encrypted/drm files will have a time limit on it, where it will stop working if not updated - because they require knowing the current date. This is how they could block it.

Dvd players didn't need to know the date. The new world of constantly evolving drm schemes falls into this world, making it east to eol devices if not updated

Correct. It’s the ability to download books directly onto the device from Amazon that is being removed.

No you can't do that on a kindle. They have a "send to kindle" feature that allows you to add non-Amazon purchased ebooks to your library. But that requires support from the backend (and an internet connection).

I'm assuming send to kindle will no longer be supported on these older devices.

You can send books to your kindle over USB, and I do that all the time for larger books that are above the size limit on the email system.

The big problem is that Amazon no longer allows you to download books from their site to your desktop, so you have no way to actually get a purchased book and send it to the kindle even over USB. However, if you buy non-DRM books from other book sellers you won't have this problem.

They block you from doing this if you're not logged in (as I discovered after wiping and rooting one to give to a friend recently).

As evidence, note that instructions for rooting them requires the device to be registered - this is because it won't be accessible over USB until you do so: https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreaking/WinterBreak/

So if you can't log in...

Not a thing on my e-ink kindle, although it is a decade old by now.

> The big problem is that Amazon no longer allows you to download books from their site to your desktop

I've bought a number of books on Kindle that were explicitly marked as being sold without DRM. Does this mean I've lost access to any DRM-free downloads that I haven't already backed up?

If you bought them from Amazon, you won't be able to get them after the cutoff date directly to that Kindle via WiFi. You may not be able to get them in a format that old Kindles can read at all.

Download and back them up now. Or just pirate them if you need them later.

The entire Kindle store system will cease working on older Kindles after the cutoff. Still works as a reader, but expect to lose things like location sync across devices.

I don't buy from Amazon, I don't turn on WiFi on my Kindle because it eats battery life, I always travel with a laptop, and I only use it to read outdoors. So I really don't care. It's my beach book. At home, I'd rather read on my iPad.

Oh, and FWIW, you can install Tailscale to a jailbroken Kindle and Taildrop files to it over WiFi, if it can read the format (for the old ones being discussed, that's mobi or azw3).

I have a Kindle that took a fall about 8 years ago and the wifi has never worked since then. I've been able to load books onto it using USB with no issues.

Also in case of reset, you cannot activate your kindle anymore

> Not quite bricked unlike, say, Sonos

Sonos backed down on the bricking offer, you did still got the discount for a new product but didn't have to effectively destroy the old one - it's just unsupported by any new features.

I feel the same way. To be honest I'm on my third kindle, their life-span seems to be about five years for me.

I don't love having to replace them, but paying €120 every five years is probably worth it. I mean that's €2/month, and I have a huge library of books which I load via calibre.

I read daily, on the bus to work, at home in bed, and while there are "more free" ereaders I've become accustomed to the kindle and have no complaints. If I were not so clumsy they'd last longer, so that's on me.

My physical library is pretty big, but being able to carry 50+ books at all times? And have a battery life of a few weeks? (I stay in airplane mode, as I transfer books via the USB cable). It's hard to complain.

Same boat as you, I'm on my second kindle in 10 years. Absolutely love the device and the convenience of reading on it. Also have a large physical library that I still add to occasionally (esp in relation to the space I have in Condo buildings), but reading on my kindle is my go-to choice.

Let me ask to what exactly have you been accustomed? Reading as such doesn't seem to be different on pretty much any e-reader.

I've become used to the idea of having 10+ books in my bag at a time, instead of having to choose which physical ones to pack.

Plus over the years I've gotten very familiar with the UI of the kindles, they're comfortable to hold and work in a way that feels natural and no-effort.

The Kobo Glo, released in 2012, is still getting updates to the latest Kobo firmware version.

In fact all Kobo e-ink devices, except the Kobo Mini, wifi, and the original one, are still getting firmware updates.

Their android-based tablets with IPS screens are all discontinued though (as far as I am aware).

This is more than Amazon ever did. They haven't updated the firmware on some of their devices that are officially "supported" in years.

Not to mention that those devices all support regular EPUBs out of the box, and so you can still put new content on them today.

Of course, you'll get a bit more out of them if you convert your EPUBs to KEPUBs with Kepubify[0], but the point remains that Kobos are supplemented by their cloud/connected features, not inherently dependent on them.

0: https://pgaskin.net/kepubify/

I don’t understand why anyone would choose a Kindle over the Kobo range of devices.

When I bought the Kobo Clara it was also a significantly better device purely on hardware specs. It was slightly more expensive, but that’s more than paid for by how long it’s already lasted me, whereas my spouse’s kindle (bought before we discovered Kobo), is already e-waste.

Kobo has also officially tied up with iFixit to provide official fixing guides and parts, allowing for relatively inexpensive hardware repair (to be fair, the battery replacement process I went through my device was quite annoying due to the waterproofing layer, but it worked, and my device is much older than their iFixit partnership, so hopefully the newer devices have repairability more in mind).

Kobo also integrates with public libraries via Overdrive

It’s amazing to check out a book from your library and have it sync to your kobo, all paid for with your library card

You literally would have to pay me to go back to a Kindle

Support here is pretty loose. These devices were already not supported in the traditional sense. They were not getting firmware updates, they were just allowed to continue using Amazon's DRM scheme and connect to the store.

AFAIK it's still possible to authorize ancient supported ePub readers with Adobe Digital Editions and load up DRMed books from providers like Google Play even with devices like the Sony PRS-505 (e.g,https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/reader-digital-book...), despite them exiting the market over a decade ago. Kobo also has continued providing firmware updates to devices from 2011, and even their unsupported devices can still load books via ADE or the Kobo Desktop App.

> I have absolutely no faith that whatever other device I switch to will still be supported in 10+ years.

I don't have that faith either, but it still irks me when good hardware has to get chucked for software reasons. And this goes double for when those software reasons are about stupid-ass DRM.

But in this particular instance I don't consider it to be that bad for me personally, since I don't rely on being able to access Amazon DRM books. But a lot of perfectly working devices are going to get landfilled for this.

My typewriter has been successfully serviced 45 years after being produced.

True.

I would point out that in 45 years ago, in 1981, the typewriter as a product was over 100 years old (first sold 1874). There was a lot of time to standardize by 1981. And there probably haven't been a lot of serviceable pre-1900s typewriters for quite a while.

The first Kindle came out in 2007. Who knows what an e-reader will be like in 2107?

I got it. And I've played a 1905 Martin and you can still plug a 1950s telecaster into a 1950s amp in turn plugged into wall power and everything works. Just saying, that is not the consumer electronics world in 2026.

The amp would only be working if it had repairs multiple times by now though. Capacitors don't last 75 years, and tubes last much shorter than capacitors.

A replacement set of tubes for a 1950s Fender amp costs $200-$400 today, just for parts. A lot more than a new Kindle. A Kindle might even be less e-waste than a set of tubes too.

True, but most manufacturers don't go out of their way to break their old devices. Neglect is one thing, this feels more like theft.

What a shame that iPhone 6 cannot install the latest apps from App Store. This is robbery from Apple.

There's a world of difference between software dependencies going out of date between many releases and a company deliberately disabling older devices from downloading static ebook files instead of maintaining some sort of basic backward compatibility.

> maintaining some sort of basic backward compatibility

Sounds easy for you to type that out on a forum without having to maintain a two decade old stack, which probably has tons of "software dependencies going out of date"

But iPhone 6 can still download whatever version supported by the latest iOS version on the phone, right?

That catalog is diminishing if not almost completely gone. Even if an app exists, unless it is (mostly) local, chances are that it's so old that it cannot talk to the remote server using the correct API. For mainstream apps, if it launches at all, many will immediately tell you to upgrade to a newer version otherwise it won't work.

What is the support burden? It needs to be able to sync with your ebook library. Thats it.

Kindles aren't like phones and computers, you dont need an upgrade every few years because software consumes the latest hardware. They just open epub files.

Buy something that runs the latest LineageOS, and use the Kindle app.

If you want greater security, substitute Graphene for Lineage.

These will not be e-ink displays, but the longevity is perhaps the longest available from independent vendors.

If you choose non-e-ink displays, than the best longevity will be for GNU/Linux devices like Librem 11.

They likely won't support the Kindle app, however, and the users won't be able to access the books they paid for but don't really own thanks to DRM.

Not the same thing. Those old devices are essentially being bricked. You will no longer be able to sign into them.

Amazon is offering a 20% discount to owners of those devices to switch to any other modern kindle.

reMarkable is doing a decent job, their first generation device launched in 2017. Still getting updates. It is discontinued for sale, but there is no reason to believe reMarkable will stop updating their other devices if they're _still_ updating a device they don't even sell anymore.

On top of that, their aftermarket and open source situation is pretty good.

They're not ideal e-readers though, but if you're in the market for a good e-ink device with long-term support and that works well with calibre? Might be worth a look.

until the software compatibility with the older model compromises the newer models. Kudos for them for still updating a device no longer on sale, but Apple does the same, until it doesn't. The fact that they are still updating the first generation today does not mean they will do so tomorrow.

That said, remarkable are great devices as well.

I can still read my decade old books

What's also not mentioned is that the discontinued devices don't support KFX.

KFX is the modern kindle format, AZW meanwhile is heavily PDF-based. KFX was designed ground-up by Amazon, supports every modern feature they could think of, and presumably couldn't be backported to 2013 and earlier Kindles; AZW meanwhile was basically a wrapper around a subset of PDF. KFX is a complete redo, notable enough it's what "Enhanced Typesetting" on every Kindle product page means, not a small DRM upgrade.

By doing this, all authors will soon receive guarantees that they will have the full KFX feature set when designing eBooks, and won't break AZW by accident. Trying to point this out though to the "it's about DRM" or "it's about obsolescence" crowd will get you downvoted to oblivion before the truth is even considered (speaking from experience, -4 when I dared suggest legitimate reasons exist) and is a prime example of echo chambers and deeply ingrained bias on this forum.

I don't follow the logic here. Users of old devices aren't asking for new features, they're merely asking for their devices not to be bricked. If an author wants to design against a new set of features they can do that, and that book will not be available on older hardware. Just like, if you want to build an Android app against a newer version you can do that without forcing every human being to replace their phone.

The old kindles can still read all previously downloaded content. Amazon's warning is literally exactly that - you can't download new books or redownload old books (i.e. AZW versions).

but that has nothing to do with what you just said. How would being able to continue to download, or purchase, old books affect the ability of authors to create books to new standards going forward? It's not like me being able to still buy an ebook version made in 2015 on my device from 2012 going to interfere with you publishing a book in 2026. That's just bricking the device in case the user ever has to reset their device or has not downloaded their library.

It complicates the Store UX, too, if they have to add "This book is/is not supported by your device" warnings to every book which also needs to know which device you are intending. With the average kindle owner often buying books directly from Amazon.com rather than the on-device Store and often having 2+ devices, they'd possibly need an exponential number of those warnings ("This book is supported by your Kindle Oasis and Kindle Paperwhite C, but not your Kindle Paperwhite B or Kindle Paperwhite A").

Also, maybe the publisher of that book in 2015 wants to upgrade to new ebook features for that book in 2026, for instance they want to add the physical book's original illustrations now that Kindle finally supports more illustrations. Does Amazon have to keep both of the 2015 and 2026 versions of the book depending on which device the user wants to use? How confused is the user when some of their devices have lovely illustrations and others don't? Should the user be able to choose to read the 2015 version of the file even on devices that support the 2026 version because they hate the book's illustrations and find them distracting?

(That gets into a larger discussion that Amazon has always preferred updating books in place on kindles with later editions as they are published, which archivists hate especially because the kindle doesn't have a great "edition version number" to rely on to track for when Amazon has delivered an update to a file, but which often consumers prefer because typos slowly disappear and books subtly become better than the last time you read them, presuming the Publisher isn't doing some drastic bait and switch and it focused only on "plussing" the book.)

They are bricking the devices and not allowing them to log back into the service if they ever log out. All they had to do was not allow them to access / purchase from the store rather than keeping them from logging in.

The original AZW format was MOBI-based, not PDF-based. MOBI originally from a company called MobiPocket, which Amazon eventually acquired, was built to be an ePub competitor and like ePub was an HTML and JS-based solution, but in a somewhat different, proprietary DRM-friendlier container format. (ePub is "just" a ZIP file, with the DRM applied sometimes inside the container rather than outside it.)

MOBI stopped keeping up with ePub standards and standard features, in part because Amazon acquired MobiPocket. The KFX is just ePub with a new proprietary DRM container around the ZIP file that is ePub's container.

The 2013 boundary is also the "supports ePUB files directly without a conversion process" boundary in Amazon's kindle OS. It's not just useful to know for book file authors, but as a consumer it becomes useful for a quick "Can I buy a standards compliant DRM-free EPUBs such as from sites like DriveThruFiction and just send them to my Kindle with no other steps?"

No Kindle supports ePub natively. Amazon converts ePub to a supported format when you use the send to kindle email service. If you just load the book on over USB it won't work.

Every kindle that supports the new format (Kindle devices since 2013 with latest OS upgraded) support loading non-DRM ePubs directly over USB. There's no conversion anymore. (I've done this.)

Amazon's not going to openly advertise that this deprecation is also the line in the sand where "non-DRM ePub just works", but that's what has happened.

Of course one of the sadder problems with the ePub ecosystem is that it uses the same file extension for DRM contained and non-DRM contained ePubs. At a glance it isn't easy to tell if an ePub is not DRMed. Amazon does not support any of the existing ePub DRM schemes. Their own KFX DRM is very unique and proprietary and doesn't play nice with ePub DRM "standards". You can't load DRMed ePubs over USB, those don't work. Sometimes that gives an impression still that "Amazon does not support ePubs natively", but that's the nature of DRM and how much DRM hurts the entire ebook industry in every direction.

Are you sure about that? Even Amazon's own sales page state: "Kindle Format 8 (AZW3), Kindle (AZW), TXT, PDF, unprotected MOBI, PRC natively; PDF, DOCX, DOC, HTML, EPUB, TXT, RTF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP through conversion; Audible audio format (AAX). Learn more about supported file types for personal documents." implying that ePub only works through conversion. They don't support DRMed ePubs through conversion either so it's a bit odd they say that instead of including it natively.

As I said, anecdotally I've already done it. Amazon only just enabled the PC "Send to Kindle" to support ePub directly instead of the old silly work around of rename the .epub to .kfx (and no other change). They've been very bad at keeping their list of formats up to date in their own documentation. Some of that perhaps because they don't want it to be so obvious and it is intentional obfuscation (to keep people using their store rather than going elsewhere for books), some of that because a lot of their kindle documentation seems to be in a "isn't broke, don't fix it" frozen state for years at time. You'll also note that the text you found doesn't mention "Kindle Format 10 (KFX)" at all and also you might notice that TXT and PDF are mentioned on both sides of that text as both "natively" and "through conversion" which seems to imply the original text was from the era when they were converted and they were added to the "natively" side later without remembering to clean up the other side. (They both have native support today.)

I was curious and just tested this with directly putting an ePub on my Kindle and it did not work.

I also tried renaming the ePub to a .kfx and it still did not work.

I have also been unable to make this work. I don't know what WorldMaker is doing differently.

Having Calibre auto-convert it and not realize I guess.

TXT and PDF are on both sides because Amazon will convert them to the appropriate Amazon format if you use send to kindle. TXT has always been natively supported on Kindle. As fair as Amazon is concerned, KFX is an internal format only for their use so there's no need to list it. When Amazon added ePub conversion officially KFX had already existed for over half a decade.

Your anecdote also seems to be the only instance of it working natively. Keep in mind Calibre will autoconvert for you.

AZW is clearly not PDF based. Try opening an actual PDF on a Kindle and compare the experience.

I had a 12y old Paperwhite 2gen and have an 11th gen one.

PDF were just not meant to be viewed on the old one, but the 11th gen handles them surprisingly well.

and another thing: im not mad. please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad.

Unfortunately I’ve found the majority of “authors” on Amazon these days for new books are just AI slop. And I think it’s only going to get worse

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