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.
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
I'm assuming send to kindle will no longer be supported on these older devices.
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.
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...
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:
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.
But you cannot just USB an EPUB onto your Kindle without any conversion process. (Calibre does make it very simple, though.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.)
However, I woke up from my stupor when Micro$oft's eBook store closed and purged their library from under everybodies butts. Giving Amazon complete control over my library is a horrible thought, so I'm out.
I am now a happy Boox Go 10.3 + BookFusion user. Crisp screen, great battery life, full android with play store underneath. It syncs to my phone, has most of the bells and whistles I need in terms of reading, and it supports writing handwritten notes (albeit not onto the ebook itself; that's apparently too sci-fi even for 2026), and Bookfusion can sync notes into Obisidian vaults via an Obsidian plugin. I feel in control. I buy books from alternative sites with either no DRM to begin with, or where I'm confident I can remove it. Bookfusion costs me 20EUR a year.
I'm fairly happy with my setup.
EDIT: yes, I'm aware Boox are not the good guys in this story. I have not signed up to any of their services - the device is perfectly usable without that. I turned their book shop off immediately, and I do monitor+block the Chinese IPs it's trying to reach on my router.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle#Sales
[0] https://allthingsd.com/20130812/amazon-to-sell-4-5-billion-w...
[1] https://tech.yahoo.com/phones/articles/amazon-unveils-kindle...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/01/06/three-in-...
Edit: also MSRP on ebooks is lower than for print versions (very roughly 50%, based on a couple randomly checked books)
An ebook has zero cost of distribution and no middlemen.
A physical book has to be typeset, printed, shipped to stores, shipped to customers, marketed in store, etc etc etc.
If a physical book is sold for $10 at least half that is printing, distribution and retail.
Like the GP, the price fixing of ebooks at the Dane price as physical books mothers me as well, particularly because physical books can be sold, lent or given away.
The exact same thing happened when CDs launched. They were cheaper to produce than vinyl or cassette very quickly but they sold at a premium for no reason at all.
The costs of printing and retail are definitely less than half the sales price: https://www.davidderrico.com/cost-breakdowns-e-books-vs-prin... Publishers say it's 10%; Derrico thinks they are underestimating certain logistical costs but no way it's 50%.
Scroll down to where the cost breakdown of a paperback is. More than $5 once you include distribution and retailing.
Or, as some might say, more than 50% of $10.
Paper is cheap. Shipping is cheap. The incremental cost of making a physical book is so small as to be noise in the overall book price.
What on earth are all the middlemen between book being authored and it being sold to a customer that add so much overhead that the cost of printing and logistics disappears in the noise???
> We are still dealing with a home screen that prioritizes advertisements and promoted recommendations over your actual library. Navigating a large collection of books remains a chore, with sluggish animations and a lack of robust folder management that has been a standard feature on rival devices for years.
There are two tabs on main Kindle screen - Home and Library (and also pretty good search). In Library you can see all your books AND collections as folders.
BOOX devices have their own issues https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33353640
I think Kobo has same issues with DRM as Amazon does.
Also, Kindle devices are cheaper, last time I checked, low end models of competitors, didn't have flush-front screens, like Paperwhite.
I never had problems described in this article (but YMMV of course).
Of course, the general state of e-book devices is pretty abysmal. There are no good options I'm aware of.
For me, I've mostly switched to reading on my phone. Dark mode, plus OLED, works very well for my needs.
I use Koreader: after experimenting with various configuration parameters for a few days, the UI is now stable and tailored to my taste. Once in a while, I switch to another app: Plato is better at handling huge PDF files.
Another bonus point is that I can mount my ereader as a USB mass-storage and rsync the git repository of my ebooks onto it.
FWIW, I've had the same issue with my Kindle, and cleaning the screen seemed to fix it reliably.
But the Overdrive issues are infuriating, especially when you miss out on a hold from the library and have to get in the queue again. On popular books it can take months. :(
I’ll happily keep reading on my kindle, it’s the most ergonomic way of reading for me especially when traveling. I get that there are other options like Kobo, but I don’t see it as significantly better than the Kindles. And I like the fact that I can also use the iPad and iPhone apps for kindle to read on the go if I don’t have the physical kindle with me.
Some of this post just seems that an "Android Authority" only just now realized there are less-forked Android-based e-readers versus Kindle and they feel happier with the Android ecosystem (and its DRM) than Amazon's. To me it feels a bit like a choice between Purple Drazi and Green Drazi. Many of the same problems but a different ascot color.
I haven't had a job that requires travel in a long time, so looking at it from that perspective, having my library also require some kind of additional device maintenance cycle or whatever really adds a layer of complexity I don't want to deal with, so depending on what options I have and what I'm buying, I'm finding myself these days purchasing physical books more frequently just to avoid the hassle for future me.
Since then, I bought a Kindle Paperwhite, and I've made a game of either getting free e-books when offered on the store, or purchasing books when on sale and I've had sufficient Amazon gift cards from Microsoft Rewards, so that I've not spent "real" money on any virtual books, except for when I've purchased an ebook to go along with a newly published hardcover by an author whose work I feel strongly enough that it merits such doubled purchasing.
> Amazon recently confirmed that starting May 20, these older models will lose all access to the Kindle Store. While you can technically keep reading books already on the device, the real kicker is the factory reset limitation built into the software. If you ever need to reset your device or try to register it to a new account after the deadline, it becomes a literal paperweight.
also, i use my kindle to read library books. will that still work?
Battery life standby time isn't nearly as good, but being able to also read Notion pages, review full PDFs, and other benefits from having an actual tablet, make the battery life sacrifice worth it.
Jailbreak on very old Kindles is reasonably straightforward and the fact that Amazon hasn't even put out point releases to stop it (as the do with newer models) is a strong hint that they've just given up on maintaining them. I still have a K3 (Kindle Keyboard) that not only is jailbroken: it runs Tailscale.
Unprotected books, no problem. Anna's Archive + Calibre will keep working just fine.
We should be normalizing a separation of device and ecosystem. These are for consuming books, it's not an awful inconvenience to sideload every 19 hours of consumption to queue up the next read.
Kindles have the best text rendering (imo), and calibre can be used to sideload books. My PW1 had stellar text rendering. My next kindle, Kindle 10 had a lower PPI but decent text rendering. I now use a PW5 and the text is flawless.
Kindle's UI does suck, though. Very slow and the keyboard is glacial. Still, page turns are zippy and it collects highlights in a central file, which is very handy.
I don't know if the alternative e-readers have an equivalent store? Tracking down epub files on my PC then transferring to the device multiple times a week sounds a bit frustrating as an alternative.
Also they support kindles for a long time, my kindle oasis from 2016 that I bought used still is supported, and the things battery also somehow is still in good shape.
Never buy another Kindle? I keep mine in airplane mode all the time and sideload all the books/papers I want to read. It works practically just as well as when I bought it. Why wouldn't I buy another? If Amazon makes a Kindle with color at 300 PPI, I will.
Sure, proper EPUB support would be nice, but if I need that I can jailbreak and install Koreader.
If there's another device with comparable hardware/software/battery, I'd consider it. AFAIK, Kindle still has the best standby battery life.
Have things improved since the last time I checked in? I really hate so much about the kindle and its ecosystem but it seems to be the best out there.
I caught wind of the second-gen Boox Go 7 (I realize you already mentioned Boox) that runs Android, also available with color, almost immediately after I ordered a blacklisted Oasis yesterday. And do note, it doesn't seem to have the grip taper on the rear side, though the running Android and color screen look like a more-than worthwhile tradeoff to my tastes. (So that I could theoretically sync bookmarks and notes with my reading on my Android phone.)
An un-registerable Oasis is drastically cheaper than that on the used market, so fortunately I was able to duck the buyer's remorse.
today i use a boox page, after a friend complimented his
Depending on your model or version, it's not hard.
I'm rocking a newer Paperwhite Special Edition, with KOreader installed.
Kindle to end store downloads and registering for 1st-5th gen kindles in May
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47678320
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690049
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47747330
Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th