Amazon has told owners it will soon stop supporting older Kindle models - a move which has left some users outraged.
In emails from the tech giant, affected users were thanked for being a “longtime Kindle customer” but told devices released during or before 2012 would no longer receive updates from 20 May.
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.
Amazon said it has supported affected models for years and their active users have been offered discounts to help “transition to newer devices”, but some have criticised it for making up to two million devices “obsolete”.
“I have a Kindle Touch that I’ve had since 2013, it works great, I bought a book on it a few months ago, and suddenly it’s obsolete,” one X user wrote in a post tagging Amazon.
Suggestions? I still have an early gen kindle (that was ad supported), and I jailbroke it and have been pretty happy with it ever since.
I went with Kobo, it works fabulously, has a good library for me to buy books from. I can download books myself and sideload as needed. Links nicely with Caliber to manage my book collection. Still working fine. I’m mindful that a couple of years is a long time in the tech world, so i’d hope that there are now many more alternatives.
That’s cool! Yea I’ve looked at the Kobo devices. I think for me, the lower cost of the kindle, especially with the ad supported version (which I bypassed by literally never connecting it to Wi-Fi), was a big plus for me at the time. I assume Amazon subsidized some of the cost assuming you’d buy from their store. I just sideloaded all my ebooks of course.
When it dies I’ll definitely be looking for a new option.
They definitely subsidized them. It’s part of their business model.
I just got a Kobo Libre Color and I’m blown away by the quality. For the general crowd it has the same “it just works” appeal as Kindles, but for the tech crowd it’s an open book. You can even ssh into it without the need for jailbreaking.
That does sound temping!
Please please please stop trying to get me to accidentally lose my older Kobo
I’ve been keeping an eye on pocketbook. They collect very little information about you, support all major formats, and seems to support their devices for a long time
I’ll check them out!