When Amazon first announced they would be ending support for all Kindles released before 2013, I thought it wasn’t that big of a deal and was something we should have expected to happen eventually. 14 years is a long run for any handheld electronic gadget. Nothing works forever, and it’s unrealistic to expect any ereader to last for more than 10 years if you use it all the time.
But then yesterday I saw the above image (via MobileRead) of the message that shows up on older Kindles now when you try to download an ebook, and it just lands differently.
Many of these devices still function for their intended purpose. These older Kindles were a key part of Amazon’s ability to dominate the ebook market. Now one of the most profitable companies in the world has chosen to no longer support their own products that were a cornerstone of their business.
At first I thought it was somewhat similar to how Microsoft forced everyone to update to Windows 11, and denied perfectly working PCs the update for arbitrary reasons. But it’s different with Kindles because they were designed with the sole purpose to read ebooks from Amazon. And now they are taking that away forever.
The Real Reason Older Kindles are Getting the Boot
If Amazon hadn’t phased out the ability to download and transfer ebooks from their website last year, these older Kindles could have still been supported today, even if they cut them off from their servers because of “outdated security protocols”.
DRM is at the root of this problem. If Kindle ebooks didn’t have DRM things would have transpired differently with these older Kindles. People would still be able to sideload purchased Kindle ebooks if they didn’t have DRM.
But no, Amazon is on a mission to close off all ways to get ebooks out of the Kindle ecosystem, and now even if you own a Kindle you’re getting closed off. They use piracy as an excuse to keep the gates locked, and paying customers are the ones getting locked out, while pirates keep finding new ways to steal whatever they want with ease. DRM isn’t effective at all; it’s just hurting legitimate paying customers and making it so they can no longer use the Kindle devices they purchased as intended.
An End of an Era
Amazon has released 12 generations of Kindles to date, and the first 5 generations have now been cut off from Amazon forever. That’s a bad look, and it’s not how a reputable company should chose to do business. People aren’t going to trust a company that stops supporting their own products, especially when they still function and are capable of being used as originally intended.
Kindles aren’t high-tech phones or computers that people use for things like banking and storing top-secret documents; they’re simple devices designed to display ebooks. That’s it. Something that basic should still be usable for as long as it works. Paper books from hundreds of years ago are still usable to this day. But these billion dollar companies have brainwashed us to believe that everything is disposable. It’s not worth fixing. Buy, buy, buy. Throw everything away and buy new stuff over and over again. Keep making the rich richer. That’s how the modern world works, and we shouldn’t accept things being that way.
+100
The thing is, after so much of this (see “planned obsolescence” from the ’70s & ’80s), I just feel depressed and defeated. Some things can be dragged out: no one actually *needs* a new phone right this minute just because it added a single megapixel to the camera. But it all just goes on and on with *everything*. In fact, I asked a maker of office supply products how to adjust my battery=powered pencil sharpener to make a l0nger, sharper point. I rarely use it because the point is too short. I rec’d an answer that since the model was discontinued, they had no advice for me. There’s nothing special about the sharpener part itself. It just turns with battery power. But it’s now obsolete so, no, we can’t/won’t talk about it. Geez.
My main use of Amazon Kindle now is only to read KU titles on my Voyage. I buy elsewhere and have been doing ever since they removed D&T. I’ve heard many complaints of KU but I’ve found plenty of authors I greatly enjoy and I don’t want to abandon their works. I wish the authors all sold directly and didn’t have to sign those exclusivity contracts though.
Once they end support for my Voyage, I’m definitely not going to buy a new Kindle from them. I’ll browse my local thrift shops and the like for something used that’s supported to read the KU books.