Ever since Amazon started sending out emails last week about dropping support for older Kindles, I’ve been seeing some people say you’ll still be able to use Send-to-Kindle or email to send documents and non-Amazon ebooks to those Kindle devices, but unfortunately that is not the case.
Moving forward, all Kindles released before 2013 will only support transferring documents via USB. If your Kindle is jailbroken you’ll have other options, but the stock software will no longer support wireless delivery of any kind.
Amazon confirms this on the unsupported Kindles help page on their website. They should’ve made it one of the main bullet points to make it clearer, but they put it toward the bottom behind parenthesis:
You can transfer personal documents to impacted E-Readers using a USB cable (Send to Kindle option won’t be available).
They probably want to phase out support for older Kindle formats entirely at this point. It started when they discountinued the download and transfer option for ebooks last year. That’s most likely the real reason why they are doing this now. Older Kindles don’t support the newer KFX format so it’s easier to just drop support for them.
They can give the convenient “security” excuse, but the fact is those older Kindles haven’t been updated in many years anyway. They aren’t any more of a security risk now than they were a year or two ago. The Kindle Paperwhite 1 is the latest model that Amazon is dropping support for, and the last time it was updated was in 2015.
On the plus side, if phasing out support for older formats is the goal, that means Amazon shouldn’t be dropping support for any other older Kindle models anytime soon. Some people are concerned about the Voyage and other older Kindles getting the boot next, but they might remain supported for a long time still, especially now that Amazon has come up with a way to deliver ebooks with hardened DRM to older Kindles without updating them.
I was wondering why the Paperwhite 1 was the cutoff, but it makes sense considering the Paperwhite 2 is the oldest Kindle model to support KFX format. Someone just posted a comment this morning saying their Paperwhite 2 is getting ebooks with the new hardened DRM now. The timing is a little too convenient for this to be a coincidence. This whole thing is about making DRM removal more difficult, and Amazon is willing to cutoff support for older devices to accomplish that.
This isn’t uncommon all across electronic devices. Apple, Android, Microsoft. Samsung, all do this at some point. They do it to simplify support. But more importantly to increase sales.
My question is whether the web browser will work and whether I can use send.djazz.se to send files in MOBI/AZW3 format.
It should just be Amazon’s servers that won’t serve you books, so you’ll probably still be able to do that
But unless you’ve already downloaded them last year, all your Kindle ebooks are trapped on the Amazon servers with no way to get them onto your old Kindle. Time to move on from Kindles and get a Kobo or other non-kindle device.
If they arrive at Amazon as personal documents, then no. Here’s what Nathan said to me about personal docs.
“They are treated the same way as ebooks. You can download them before the cutoff date or to Kindle apps after. After the fact you’ll have to sideload via USB or possibly setup a server.”
No, they would work because the document is downloading from send.djazz.se, not Amazon’s personal document Send To Kindle system.
I was going to mention the web browser as an option but it’s so old and outdated on those older Kindles I’d be surprised if it still works at all. I can’t imagine trying to use the browser at this point on the Kindle 3 or 4 without a touchscreen—does it even still work to download files? I remember it used to, but it’s probably been about a decade since I even had a Kindle that old.
There’s a lot of heat about this, but the fact is that if they can’t be updated to support newer TLS, then they will be unable to connect to the internet safely, and they need to be cut off. This has already happened to old Nooks and old iPhones. We’ve had the same problems with customers of our apps. They wanted to insist on running our app in Windows 95 or 98, which won’t support the protocols. It makes us feel good to blame Amazon’s greed, but these are network devices. None of them can be supported forever.
My Oasis 2 has the hardened DRM. Just checked my Paperwhite 2 and it’s still fine.