With the news coming out that Amazon is ending support for all Kindles released before 2013, some people are wrongly assuming that older Kindles will become completely useless after May 20th.
I made the mistake of going to reddit and seeing the village idiots are firmly in control of the misinformation wheel again, and it’s spinning wildly out of control. Amazon is not bricking older Kindles; that’s not what unsupported means.
First off, if you buy an electronic reading device you have to expect it’s going to stop working or stop being supported at some point in the future—that’s a given. A device being supported for 15 years is actually pretty good, especially considering the odds of the battery lasting that long are really low.
If the battery still holds a charge, your old Kindle won’t suddenly become useless when Amazon stops supporting it. The irony is you’ll still be able to buy ebooks from non-Amazon sources and sideload them onto your old “unsupported” Kindle without any problems. And the benefit to that method is your ebooks won’t be tied to Amazon so you can read them on other brands of devices in the future it you want to.
Older Kindles Still Usable After Cutoff Date
Amazon dropping support for older Kindles really just means they won’t be able to download ebooks from Amazon once May 20th hits. You can still read previously downloaded Kindle ebooks on older Kindles for as long as that Kindle works. And you can still sideload ebooks onto unsupported Kindles too.
The bigger problem is you’ll no longer be able to register older Kindles to an Amazon account, so if you factory reset your Kindle you’ll never be able to get your Amazon content back on it (don’t listen to Amazon support if you encounter a problem because their answer to everything is to do a factory reset). But Kindles can be used for sideloading ebooks without registering them.
You can also sideload ebooks to registered Kindles, so you can still buy ebooks elsewhere (from Kobo or Google, for instance), remove the DRM, convert the book to Kindle format using Calibre, and sideload it onto your older “unsupported” Kindle via USB.
Realistically, the number of people still using Kindles from a decade and a half ago has to be really small. Amazon already dropped support for the first two Kindles and removed store access from all the non-touchscreen models years ago. I am surprised they’re dropping support for the 1st Kindle Paperwhite, but it was only available for one year before it got replaced by the Paperwhite 2, which Amazon is still supporting (for now).
All Kindle models will get deprecated eventually; that’s something everyone should accept before getting a Kindle. But that doesn’t mean your Kindle will become useless once it’s no longer supported; Amazon can’t remove the ability to sideload ebooks. Some people are mad they won’t be able to use these older Kindles to get ebooks with easily removable DRM anymore—that’s probably the real reason Amazon is dropping support for these older Kindles.
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