The Wi-Fi broke on my Kindle Paperwhite years ago, and I have only one micro-B cable left that will connect to it.
Amazon is to stop supporting older Kindle models leaving longtime ebook fans unable to access new content from the Kindle store.
Devices released during or before 2012 will no longer receive updates from 20 May, affecting owners of older Kindles, including the earliest models such as the Touch and some Fire tablets. It is thought that 2m e-readers could be affected.
Users will still be able to read ebooks they have downloaded, and their accounts and their Kindle library will remain accessible on mobile and desktop apps. Active users have been offered discounts to help “transition to newer devices”. Amazon said performing a factory reset on affected Kindles would make them unusable.
Disappointed users have vented their frustration online, including in comments on The Verge, accusing Amazon of “causing waste at a large scale” and saying their devices would be reduced to a paperweight despite still working.
One wonders whether these old devices just don’t have enough telemetry built in for Amazon’s liking.
The challenge is the monopolistic death grip Amazon has on self publishing.
For many genres, authors get almost all of their income from Kindle Unlimited. KU requires exclusivity. The result is entire genres of books that are almost entirely Kindle exclusive.
So, the only real options for readers of these genes is either Kindle Unlimited (or buying on Kindle, I suppose) or piracy.
Some authors release serialized content on Patreon or a similar paid or free platform, but those platforms often only get first drafts, are difficult to navigate to get full books, and only cover a subset of authors anyway. And books get “stubbed”, which means everything past the 10% mark gets deleted to comply with Amazon exclusivity, so this is only even an option if you read the whole thing as it is being written. (FWIW, it’s also crazy expensive if you want to support authors; it can easily cost hundreds of dollars monthly with all the subscriptions.)
So, if you want authors to get paid for their work, then, realistically, you’re stuck using Kindle.
It sucks, but that’s the reality until regulators prevent Amazon from forcing exclusivity for inclusion in the KU program.