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.
I love my Kobo Libra Color. I got it to replace my Kindle Oasis, and it has the same basic form factor. I wanted the KLC because I read a lot of manga and webcomics, and can sync them directly from my Calibre server.
My only real complaint is the lack of expandability. 32GB is fine for ebooks, because text takes basically no storage space. But comics (basically images organized together in a zip archive) and audiobooks quickly eat that storage space. If it included a microSD slot, that would greatly expand how long I can go between syncs. For a device that released in 2024, only including 32GB of on-board storage is an interesting choice.
My only guess is that it doesn’t have an SD card slot because it is IPX8 rated. I know it’s technically possible to IP rate an SD card slot, but I have no idea how easy it is. Older (black and white) Libra models used an internal SD card reader. You could crack the case open with a few screws and upgrade the storage very easily. But the Libra Color uses soldered eMMC, so upgrading the storage is a no-go.