Kindle to end store downloads and registering for 1st-5th gen kindles in May

Havoc

The old kindles only support the book format with the weak encryption. ;) They also killed the ability to download books from the website a while back so directly of travel is pretty clear here.

Nicholas_C

This kind of stuff is why I no longer use a kindle. I use a kobo which IMHO is not as good of a product but it's worth not supporting this behavior.

neilv

I don't approve of a company shutting off network service for a device it sold, but... If this is a hint at much more formidable DRM coming out, could a silver lining for authors and publishers be more sales? Or is mass piracy going to just continue, full steam ahead? (Authors and publishers need any bit of good news they can get right now.)

AdmiralAsshat

Man, Amazon is really going above-and-beyond to cripple the last bastion of Kindle devices that carry a DRM scheme we can crack.

seam_carver

Side tangent: I’m the developer of Kindle Comic Converter. Kindle updates 5.19.2+ have completely broken the sideloaded manga reader with bugs like huge margins, pages being on the wrong side in 2 page landscape mode, no panel view, no % read tracker, and laggy page turns. I’ve documented the problems here and the first report was 50 days ago. https://youtu.be/Eo6K7omlE7g And I haven’t even touched all the problems with normal sideloaded books like broken embedded/publisher fonts. Kindle settings > help > contact us > email if you want to voice complaints.

sigzero

The 5th generation kindle came out in ... 2012. That's a pretty good run.

damontal

I have an old kindle keyboard I keep around for nostalgia that still works. I’m guessing this will be affected. Hoping I can still add books via usb

zokier

While everyone is commenting about drm, there is another factor to consider: TLS. These old Kindles definitely do not support up-to-date TLS ciphersuites and understandably Amazon wants/needs to drop insecure ciphersuites from public endpoints at some point. I'm pretty sure that is also the reason why the Wikipedia integration for these old Kindles broke ages ago.

SilverElfin

Does anyone use a Kindle anymore? I feel like the writing was on the wall ten years ago. It’s a dead end product that no one cares about. And all the shady stuff like forced deletion of books was a sign. But also, I think people have really become tired of sitting in front of screens. Physical books are more popular among friends than Kindles or other digital books are, and that wasn’t the case ten years ago.

lordleft

I've used a kindle for years and have bought hundreds of ebooks through Amazon's platform. The convenience of being able to carry a library with me in a single device is undeniable. ~14 years of support seems reasonable, especially in the context of modern tech. And yet decisions like this always upset me. For all the limitations of physical books, I can hand my physical books to my literal children and grandchildren when I die. As long as I tend to the book, I have it. The fact that this isn't guaranteed for DRM-locked ebooks, for all their advantages, makes me feel like we are somehow going backwards, despite our progress technologically. Instead of a future where products get unambiguously better, the future seems filled with products that come with significant trade-offs. The trade-offs are beginning to not feel worth it to me.

johanyc

Looks like my Kindle voyage's days are numbered :(