I've used a kindle for years and have bought hundreds of ebooks through Amazon's platform. The convenience of being able to carry a library with me in a single device is undeniable. ~14 years of support seems reasonable, especially in the context of modern tech. And yet decisions like this always upset me. For all the limitations of physical books, I can hand my physical books to my literal children and grandchildren when I die. As long as I tend to the book, I have it. The fact that this isn't guaranteed for DRM-locked ebooks, for all their advantages, makes me feel like we are somehow going backwards, despite our progress technologically. Instead of a future where products get unambiguously better, the future seems filled with products that come with significant trade-offs. The trade-offs are beginning to not feel worth it to me.
Lots of us felt the same way since the beginning of ebooks. If you lose your Amazon account, you lose your books, which means you never really owned them.
There are (and have been) DRM-free eBook stores. You _might_ be able to strip the DRM from your Amazon books. However, the process and ease of doing so seems to change often, I don't know if it's easy or hard right now.
In the future, consider supporting ebook manufacturers and stores that don't lock down your device, and sell DRM-free books. Kobo is one example. We have a bunch of these in our household. They don't require an account, I can just upload books via USB port on any computer, and they are pretty hackable.
We are going backwards. The concept of a library would be illegal if invented today. They are only allowed to exist today because they've been around for hundreds of years. There are still people who attack them and try to shut them down.
I buy both physical and digital books and much prefer digital, reading on my kindle is more convenient (especially to adjust the font size). For sharing with family, I have a family library set up with Amazon and the experience is really smooth.
I do enjoy owning physical copies of books I liked, and they are part of the “decor” at home at this point. I have limited space so I have 2 completely stacked bookshelves, and then piles of books around the kitchen on top of the cupboards etc.
Side tangent: I’m the developer of Kindle Comic Converter. Kindle updates 5.19.2+ have completely broken the sideloaded manga reader with bugs like huge margins, pages being on the wrong side in 2 page landscape mode, no panel view, no % read tracker, and laggy page turns. I’ve documented the problems here and the first report was 50 days ago. https://youtu.be/Eo6K7omlE7g
And I haven’t even touched all the problems with normal sideloaded books like broken embedded/publisher fonts.
Kindle settings > help > contact us > email if you want to voice complaints.
For public domain books, I use Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg, and Internet Archive, generally in that order.
For copyrighted books, anywhere as long as it provides DRM‐free EPUB or PDF.
• Humble Bundle introduces a nice sale every few days. Key marker for DRM‐free: “Use on Any Device”. Representative recent purchases: complete Peanuts for $25, complete Wheel of Time for $18, complete Malazan for $18, complete Lone Wolf and Cub for $18… I check Humble pretty regularly now.
• Google Play. Key marker for DRM‐free: “Content protection: This content is DRM free.”
• Barnes and Noble. Key marker for DRM‐free: “At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.”
Amazon rolled out DRM‐free ebooks (for some books) earlier this year, but at this point they’ve permanently lost my business.
Kobo has a bookstore that’s pretty comprehensive - I haven’t found anything missing. Not sure that gets you out of DRM land, but at least you’re not giving money to Jeff Bezos.
In this case the reason for dropping support is most likely that the only DRM they can support on that older hardware has been broken. There's no technical reason why it can't be supported, and I doubt it would cost them much (or even anything) to continue support.
Meanwhile, I can still read physical books I've had since I was a child, 40 years ago. The Kindle is undeniably more convenient than physical books, but this is absolutely an unnecessary sunset of these devices.
While everyone is commenting about drm, there is another factor to consider: TLS. These old Kindles definitely do not support up-to-date TLS ciphersuites and understandably Amazon wants/needs to drop insecure ciphersuites from public endpoints at some point. I'm pretty sure that is also the reason why the Wikipedia integration for these old Kindles broke ages ago.
Yes...but let's also be realistic. Very few people are still using this Kindle as their daily driver. They've already upgraded to a PaperWhite or something better.
But there's a very simple reason that Amazon is cutting support for these. Many people (myself included--I have a 4th Gen still kicking around) keep one around because, after Amazon removed the Download option for Ebooks awhile back, having one of these old Kindles is the only way to download ebooks in a format from Amazon that can have their DRM cracked.
All Kindles newer than a certain date use the KFX format, with an encryption scheme that is constantly changing (basically any time someone figures out how to break it, Amazon updates it). Killing support for these old devices is basically Amazon's last step in removing "legacy" encryption schemes that can still be broken.
It would be the equivalent of Nintendo delivering a new firmware update for their Wii and Wii-U systems, in order to patch out a recently-discovered exploit. It serves no other purpose than to demonstrate the extreme contempt for Amazon's end-users and the lengths they're willing to go to combat user-freedom^W "piracy".
I disagree. There's no technical reason why they can't still work. They're perfectly good devices (possibly some needing a battery replacement). Why do we think it's ok to turn working devices into e-waste, because the company behind them needs to make a "business decision".
(Which in this case is likely DRM-related, which drops my sympathy meter below zero.)
14-19 years might be a respectable lifetime for a handheld electronic device, but in most cases (good care assumed) it is not a respectable lifetime for a book.
If there's a way to read the book, the book can and will be copied. It doesn't matter if it's DRM protected with 84 bazillion bit encryption, if there are dead trees involved, or anything else. You can make it harder to copy, but copied it will be.
Mass piracy will continue full steam ahead at current rates.
Most of these sites allow you to read on a computer screen and those can be captured and OCR'd. And if they don't allow that, you can take a photo of your device and OCR that. And if you can't do that, you can manually type in the book. There's always a way, and it will always happen to any books that publishers are making any kind of profit on.
Long ago, for a few years I would occasionally buy ebooks from Amazon when it was trivial to strip the DRM with basically my credit card number and a script.
Once they started trying to lock things down further, I completely stopped buying, moving to piracy mostly, and occasional scanning of physical books.
Being more technically capable than typical, I’m hardly a normal customer to try to target, but the way I see it all this does is piss off the minority who care and are capable of getting around restrictions. Those who don’t care or aren’t capable will just continue getting cluelessly fucked over as always. These measures less about effectiveness, and more like a money themed emotional support affirmation for someone in a suit. It helps them feel like they are accomplishing something, but that’s it.
I haven’t checked lately, but I expect that “AI” tools that easily and accurately rip and format data from a picture feed of a screen will become the way to go for bypassing whatever clever encryption schemes come along. This also has the benefit of ignoring the steganographic tracking data hidden in paid files, making piracy ultimately easier for the uninformed. This sort of thing was always possible, but was a bit janky and laborious.
Same here - I'll only buy books I can read on any device of my choosing. Kindle+dedrm was an option. https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/p/drm-free is another option I have used a lot. But if it's not available, I will go to the modern day library of alexandria. I will not pay for crap that will just stop working in a few years - a book can sit on my shelf for 15 years before I get around to reading it.
I love ebook readers. I just don't put any DRM'd books on them. But I also buy all that stuff used. No more money to Bezos, and it saves the landfill, too.
I'd like to be the person with the massive shelf of pretty books in a bookshelf.
But alas, I don't have the square meters for that. Also I tend to like THICCC books and carrying around a 1600 page monster daily on my commute isn't it.
I agree that Amazon getting even more control over the ebook market would be bad for authors and publishers.
But how would (hypothetical) more formidable DRM constitute even more control over the ebook market?
(Do you mean more control by preventing more piracy? Or by preventing more good-faith circumvention? Or more control because ebooks might be published even more Amazon exclusive than they already are, because of superior anti-piracy protection?)
Does anyone use a Kindle anymore? I feel like the writing was on the wall ten years ago. It’s a dead end product that no one cares about. And all the shady stuff like forced deletion of books was a sign. But also, I think people have really become tired of sitting in front of screens. Physical books are more popular among friends than Kindles or other digital books are, and that wasn’t the case ten years ago.
I bought and use a Kindle specifically because it has zero distractions. All you can do is read. You're not interrupted with a text, or another app's notification, or anything like that. There's no temptation to use another app, because there are no other apps. It's just you, and your book.
I've used a kindle for years and have bought hundreds of ebooks through Amazon's platform. The convenience of being able to carry a library with me in a single device is undeniable. ~14 years of support seems reasonable, especially in the context of modern tech. And yet decisions like this always upset me. For all the limitations of physical books, I can hand my physical books to my literal children and grandchildren when I die. As long as I tend to the book, I have it. The fact that this isn't guaranteed for DRM-locked ebooks, for all their advantages, makes me feel like we are somehow going backwards, despite our progress technologically. Instead of a future where products get unambiguously better, the future seems filled with products that come with significant trade-offs. The trade-offs are beginning to not feel worth it to me.
Lots of us felt the same way since the beginning of ebooks. If you lose your Amazon account, you lose your books, which means you never really owned them.
There are (and have been) DRM-free eBook stores. You _might_ be able to strip the DRM from your Amazon books. However, the process and ease of doing so seems to change often, I don't know if it's easy or hard right now.
In the future, consider supporting ebook manufacturers and stores that don't lock down your device, and sell DRM-free books. Kobo is one example. We have a bunch of these in our household. They don't require an account, I can just upload books via USB port on any computer, and they are pretty hackable.
We are going backwards. The concept of a library would be illegal if invented today. They are only allowed to exist today because they've been around for hundreds of years. There are still people who attack them and try to shut them down.
I buy both physical and digital books and much prefer digital, reading on my kindle is more convenient (especially to adjust the font size). For sharing with family, I have a family library set up with Amazon and the experience is really smooth.
I do enjoy owning physical copies of books I liked, and they are part of the “decor” at home at this point. I have limited space so I have 2 completely stacked bookshelves, and then piles of books around the kitchen on top of the cupboards etc.
So I don’t think it needs to be “either or”. :)
There's always being naughty and downloading pirated ebooks.
The old kindles only support the book format with the weak encryption. ;)
They also killed the ability to download books from the website a while back so directly of travel is pretty clear here.
Yep, I will never buy another Kindle.
Side tangent: I’m the developer of Kindle Comic Converter. Kindle updates 5.19.2+ have completely broken the sideloaded manga reader with bugs like huge margins, pages being on the wrong side in 2 page landscape mode, no panel view, no % read tracker, and laggy page turns. I’ve documented the problems here and the first report was 50 days ago. https://youtu.be/Eo6K7omlE7g
And I haven’t even touched all the problems with normal sideloaded books like broken embedded/publisher fonts.
Kindle settings > help > contact us > email if you want to voice complaints.
Thank you for making such a great tool. KCC got me back into reading manga and there are so many that are so great.
For anyone looking for recommendations, I really enjoyed Pluto, Yokohama Shopping Log, and Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games.
This kind of stuff is why I no longer use a kindle. I use a kobo which IMHO is not as good of a product but it's worth not supporting this behavior.
Where do you buy your e-books?
I've stuck with Kindle, but that's 80% inertia (Amazon has most books, the device works well enough) and 20% existing library is Kindle e-books.
For public domain books, I use Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg, and Internet Archive, generally in that order.
For copyrighted books, anywhere as long as it provides DRM‐free EPUB or PDF.
• Humble Bundle introduces a nice sale every few days. Key marker for DRM‐free: “Use on Any Device”. Representative recent purchases: complete Peanuts for $25, complete Wheel of Time for $18, complete Malazan for $18, complete Lone Wolf and Cub for $18… I check Humble pretty regularly now.
• Kobo Store. Key marker for DRM‐free: “Download options: EPUB 3 (DRM-Free)”.
• Google Play. Key marker for DRM‐free: “Content protection: This content is DRM free.”
• Barnes and Noble. Key marker for DRM‐free: “At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.”
Amazon rolled out DRM‐free ebooks (for some books) earlier this year, but at this point they’ve permanently lost my business.
Also, sites to purchase DRM‐free audiobooks:
• Libro.fm
• Downpour
One could buy a physical book, and then "find" digital version of it. Seems fair to me?
Seems fair to me too. I have done and continue to do this. I have no ethical qualms doing so. Should I?
I don’t. I just don’t want physical books. I don’t have the space to store them. And the kindle is far more portable.
You can throw the physical book away or recycle it as paper. Buying them is just to make payments for the pirated books.
Kobo has a bookstore that’s pretty comprehensive - I haven’t found anything missing. Not sure that gets you out of DRM land, but at least you’re not giving money to Jeff Bezos.
Because Amazon stops supporting devices after 14 years? (while they can still be used to read books already downloaded)
Really?
In this case the reason for dropping support is most likely that the only DRM they can support on that older hardware has been broken. There's no technical reason why it can't be supported, and I doubt it would cost them much (or even anything) to continue support.
Meanwhile, I can still read physical books I've had since I was a child, 40 years ago. The Kindle is undeniably more convenient than physical books, but this is absolutely an unnecessary sunset of these devices.
In my post I said "this kind of stuff" which also includes their DRM policies (which is the real reason they are ending the users' kindle support).
While everyone is commenting about drm, there is another factor to consider: TLS. These old Kindles definitely do not support up-to-date TLS ciphersuites and understandably Amazon wants/needs to drop insecure ciphersuites from public endpoints at some point. I'm pretty sure that is also the reason why the Wikipedia integration for these old Kindles broke ages ago.
Software updates exist, I’m sure they could support it if they wanted to.
Ed25519 isn’t so new that the hardware wouldn’t be capable.
Man, Amazon is really going above-and-beyond to cripple the last bastion of Kindle devices that carry a DRM scheme we can crack.
I hate Amazon more because than most people, but let’s be realistic.
These devices came out in 2007-2012
14-19 years is a respectable lifetime for a handheld electronic device.
Yes...but let's also be realistic. Very few people are still using this Kindle as their daily driver. They've already upgraded to a PaperWhite or something better.
But there's a very simple reason that Amazon is cutting support for these. Many people (myself included--I have a 4th Gen still kicking around) keep one around because, after Amazon removed the Download option for Ebooks awhile back, having one of these old Kindles is the only way to download ebooks in a format from Amazon that can have their DRM cracked.
All Kindles newer than a certain date use the KFX format, with an encryption scheme that is constantly changing (basically any time someone figures out how to break it, Amazon updates it). Killing support for these old devices is basically Amazon's last step in removing "legacy" encryption schemes that can still be broken.
It would be the equivalent of Nintendo delivering a new firmware update for their Wii and Wii-U systems, in order to patch out a recently-discovered exploit. It serves no other purpose than to demonstrate the extreme contempt for Amazon's end-users and the lengths they're willing to go to combat user-freedom^W "piracy".
Good news: People are working on removing the latest KFX DRM, and it has already been cracked.
Bad news: Amazon is monitoring them and hasn't let up on efforts to update the DRM.
I disagree. There's no technical reason why they can't still work. They're perfectly good devices (possibly some needing a battery replacement). Why do we think it's ok to turn working devices into e-waste, because the company behind them needs to make a "business decision".
(Which in this case is likely DRM-related, which drops my sympathy meter below zero.)
14-19 years might be a respectable lifetime for a handheld electronic device, but in most cases (good care assumed) it is not a respectable lifetime for a book.
It's still unnecessary e-waste given that they work fine for their intended purposes.
The device still works. It's being crippled on purpose.
its a device for reading text ffs
Looks like my Kindle voyage's days are numbered :(
I have an old kindle keyboard I keep around for nostalgia that still works. I’m guessing this will be affected. Hoping I can still add books via usb
I don't approve of a company shutting off network service for a device it sold, but...
If this is a hint at much more formidable DRM coming out, could a silver lining for authors and publishers be more sales?
Or is mass piracy going to just continue, full steam ahead?
(Authors and publishers need any bit of good news they can get right now.)
Does stronger DRM lead to more sales? It was my impression that actual studies were at best pretty mixed.
Anecdotal: DRM actively discourages me from purchasing digital goods.
Yeah but HN commenters are not a representative sample of the ebook consumer base
Most consumers probably never heard of the word DRM
Like I said, anecdotal...
If there's a way to read the book, the book can and will be copied. It doesn't matter if it's DRM protected with 84 bazillion bit encryption, if there are dead trees involved, or anything else. You can make it harder to copy, but copied it will be.
Mass piracy will continue full steam ahead at current rates.
Most of these sites allow you to read on a computer screen and those can be captured and OCR'd. And if they don't allow that, you can take a photo of your device and OCR that. And if you can't do that, you can manually type in the book. There's always a way, and it will always happen to any books that publishers are making any kind of profit on.
DRM has always been a means of protecting a monopoly; copyright protection is merely the excuse given to justify the measure and the monopoly.
How do you imagine DRM can possibly protect text?
Long ago, for a few years I would occasionally buy ebooks from Amazon when it was trivial to strip the DRM with basically my credit card number and a script. Once they started trying to lock things down further, I completely stopped buying, moving to piracy mostly, and occasional scanning of physical books.
Being more technically capable than typical, I’m hardly a normal customer to try to target, but the way I see it all this does is piss off the minority who care and are capable of getting around restrictions. Those who don’t care or aren’t capable will just continue getting cluelessly fucked over as always. These measures less about effectiveness, and more like a money themed emotional support affirmation for someone in a suit. It helps them feel like they are accomplishing something, but that’s it.
I haven’t checked lately, but I expect that “AI” tools that easily and accurately rip and format data from a picture feed of a screen will become the way to go for bypassing whatever clever encryption schemes come along. This also has the benefit of ignoring the steganographic tracking data hidden in paid files, making piracy ultimately easier for the uninformed. This sort of thing was always possible, but was a bit janky and laborious.
Speaking of llm OCR tools, had a quick look and immediately found this: https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/kindle-ai-export
If anyone has similar tools they like I’d love to hear.
Same here - I'll only buy books I can read on any device of my choosing. Kindle+dedrm was an option. https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/p/drm-free is another option I have used a lot. But if it's not available, I will go to the modern day library of alexandria. I will not pay for crap that will just stop working in a few years - a book can sit on my shelf for 15 years before I get around to reading it.
DRM is why I will never own a second ebook reader and have returned to buying books.
None of my books stop working after 12 years, but my kindle, which still works fine, has indeed failed to do it's most basic job.
I love ebook readers. I just don't put any DRM'd books on them. But I also buy all that stuff used. No more money to Bezos, and it saves the landfill, too.
I'd like to be the person with the massive shelf of pretty books in a bookshelf.
But alas, I don't have the square meters for that. Also I tend to like THICCC books and carrying around a 1600 page monster daily on my commute isn't it.
So Kobo Libra Colour it is then.
Piracy will never be stopped. Never.
> (Authors and publishers need any bit of good news they can get right now.)
Amazon accumulating even more control over the ebook market is not good news for authors and publishers.
I agree that Amazon getting even more control over the ebook market would be bad for authors and publishers.
But how would (hypothetical) more formidable DRM constitute even more control over the ebook market?
(Do you mean more control by preventing more piracy? Or by preventing more good-faith circumvention? Or more control because ebooks might be published even more Amazon exclusive than they already are, because of superior anti-piracy protection?)
The 5th generation kindle came out in ... 2012. That's a pretty good run.
I own books approaching 100 years old. 14 years is pretty sad
Does anyone use a Kindle anymore? I feel like the writing was on the wall ten years ago. It’s a dead end product that no one cares about. And all the shady stuff like forced deletion of books was a sign. But also, I think people have really become tired of sitting in front of screens. Physical books are more popular among friends than Kindles or other digital books are, and that wasn’t the case ten years ago.
> It’s a dead end product that no one cares about.
I think you are very much out of touch with the average book/e-book consumer.
I bought and use a Kindle specifically because it has zero distractions. All you can do is read. You're not interrupted with a text, or another app's notification, or anything like that. There's no temptation to use another app, because there are no other apps. It's just you, and your book.
People literally own MULTIPLE kindles with different covers on them for different situations.