KOReader is so good for reading PDFs, compared to the native reader, I’m very impressed. Supports proper landscape mode (where swiping to next page moves to the second half of the current page, THEN next swipe gets you to the first half of the next page), supports auto-rotation, support auto-cropping of PDFs with controllable margin (killer feature), supports contrast adjustments, … It does not support handwritten annotations, but for just reading PDFs - it’s perfect.
I always found KOReader to be too fiddly for ePubs, has that changed recently or have I been doing it wrong? I want a set of sane defaults to be applied to every book, I don’t want to tweak every book individually. This leads to distraction for me
You can set defaults for all books. Simply long press on the option you want to be a global default. That said, it can still be fiddly since different books respond in different ways. Most of that seems to be due to differences in how publishers handle formatting, but I'm fairly certain that some of it is due to how the renderer handles things.
It’s still the case in my opinion. Yes, you can fiddle to make it work. You can set sane defaults. The heuristics for applying styles etc apparently are not clever enough because sometimes you still get strange results. Comparing it to the default Kobo reader is like using a Mac vs a Linux DE. As I’ve gotten older I find I no longer enjoy tweaking every possible parameter :)
I can still use Kindle Scribe exactly the same as before the Jailbreak. Think of it this way - before it had Library (for reading and annotating Kindle books) and Notebooks (for writing). Now it has a third thing - KOReader (for reading only, KOReader doesn’t support handwriting annotation).
I have a lot of PDFs and this is the most interesting. Do you use the Calibre KOReader add-on to sync and manage? Does that work well? Do deletions of books sync?
Does highlighting annotation work/sync fine?
I would make the move just for that alone since SendtoKindle is kind of basic.
I didn’t get that advanced yet. I’m trying to figure out the Dropbox integration at the moment. I don’t use Calibre. I know highlighting works (I’ve annotated the PDF I’m reading), but I didn’t test highlights export / sync yet.
I revived my old kindle pw7 using this a week or so ago. If you have an old kindle lying around, you can use it as an e-ink weather dashboard (or anything else for that matter, as long as you can convert it into a 8bit greyscale image).
Only upgrade I did from my old kindle paper white was to a water-sealed version. Really nice to take it to the beach or a pool then just hose it off when I’m done so it doesn’t have sand and such everywhere. Just less stressful to carry around in general.
USB-C on the newer Paperwhites (and base Kindles? IDK if those changed over yet), in case you just want all your (portable) gear to be USB-C.
What is extremely annoying is people constantly and universally lauding the Kindle for Kids option, when it is only offered in the US. Or, at least, its barely offered in the EU.
I replaced the USB port on my older kindle with a USB-C port when I did the same for a bunch of devices. Not an option for everyone but if you have the time and patience (and a little skill) I highly recommend it.
I gave up on my first paperwhite last year (10+ years old). Would randomly lose its charge, which was annoying when bringing it on trips (and often not having an old micro-usb charger lying around). And from being stuck into all kinds of pockets and bags without a protector (half the use was it fitting in my pants) had seriously scratched up the screen. The new one I got is nice, but other than the old one being beaten up, I don't notice much difference. A bit faster to click around, but in the end it's mostly the same.
Mine would have longer and longer delays on each page turn when I started using it again last year. It's a 10+ years Paperwhite as well.
I jailbroke it and installed KOReader. Suddenly, no delays, great interface, wi-fi sync with Calibre. I might replace the battery one day, but it still lasts 2-3 books.
Not sure what my old kindle version was, it had a keyboard though, but I upgraded eventually because I wanted a warm toned backlight. It's nice that the newer ones are a bit snappier too.
I upgraded from Kindle Keyboard to Kindle 2023 last year. Backlight is very nice and I appreciate its lighter weight, but otherwise it's pretty much the same.
Yup yup yup. I cracked my keyboard and got a paperwhite. I love the dark mode for late night reading but would probably go back to a refurbished keyboard in the face of any strife; just like the old form factor more.
Unfortunately your Kindle needs to be registered to do this, and it's often a phenomenal pain in the ass to get old Kindles to register, if it's possible at all. I've got two old Paperwhites and I can't get either of them to register despite trying for hours and hours with every troubleshooting step I've found.
Kindles have long had a history of gaolbreaks. I've scarcely seen a scene as dedicated as the folks over on the MobileRead Forums (https://www.mobileread.com/forums). I notice many of the names associated with this new break as people who were associated with hacking early Kindles back in the early 2010s.
For context, it's been a little while since we've had a fresh gaolbreak for new Kindles. Last one was LanguageBreak, which came out back in 2023 and required firmware 5.16.2.1.1 or lower.
I'm an American and I don't differentiate between jail and gaol; I just assumed the latter to just be a funny European spelling of the former.
But yes, we do differentiate between jail and prison - the former usually being for those with short sentences or for those awaiting trial, and the latter being for those with long sentences. Interesting that other countries don't maintain that distinction - but I guess most countries don't have such a sprawling prison-industrial complex to warrant separate short-term v. long-term detention classifications.
Jails do hold long term prisoners, and prisons get pre-trial prisoners too.
There’s literally a market for jail beds. So prisoners are often sent where there’s an open spot, with little distinction between “short term” and “long term”.
A better distinction is that jails are run by a law enforcement agency, while prisons are not.
Your distinction is probably a better one, but the one I've heard is lockups hold temporarily from hours-days, jails hold prisoners for sentences up to a year, prisons for over a year. People might end up in a jail for much longer, but normally they don't.
> A better distinction is that jails are run by a law enforcement agency, while prisons are not.
Depends on whether you count corrections agencies as law enforcement agencies. On the one hand, I'm pretty sure all states have distinct agencies for police v. prisons, but on the other hand, corrections officers are usually sworn peace officers and therefore would count as "law enforcement".
Another distinction, come to think of it, is that prisons are usually under federal or state agencies¹, while jails are usually under county or municipal agencies.
----
¹ The only exception I've found is Chester County Prison in Pennsylvania, which is under the Chester County Dept. of Corrections. Wikipedia also has an article on a "Northampton County Prison" (also in PA), but that county's website calls it the "Northampton County Jail"; on a tangential note, if corrections agencies don't count as law enforcement agencies, then the Northampton County Jail would be an exception to the "jails are run by a law enforcement agency" rule.
It's true that prison is an industry in America, but it's also true that only a small minority of prisoners are held in private prisons; about 8% of federal and state prisoners are in private prisons.
The prison industry isn't limited to private prisons; there is substantial private industry financial interest in the operation of the public prisons, as well, whether its providing services to a literally captive market, benefiting from prison labor, etc.
Seeing your comment, and all the comments that follow, is reminding me of the "Misconceptions developers believe about X" posts that circulate on here occasionally.
It seems like there's a lot of beliefs that don't universally apply.
> Only Americans (to the extent I know) differentiate jail and gaol. Jail and prison.
You inhabit a very different reality than everybody else. Americans do not differentiate jail and gaol; Americans don't use the word "gaol" under any circumstances, ever. It is not a part of American English.
It's a common spelling in fantasy video games and books, but it feels kind of performative.
These same games will have voice actors pronounce "ye" as it's written, unaware that the y is a typographic substitute for Þ. "ye olde" is pronounced "the old". But likewise, there's some VAs that clearly only ever read a word, like in the newer God of War games where a character mangles "prescient".
Same had to actually look it up and at least Merriam-Webster lists the word as “chiefly British spellings of JAIL, JAILER”. Which at least hints that the dictionary writers thought it is less common out side of Britain.
I graduated from high school and even got a bachelor's degree. I've read several books written before last year, and have talked to dozens of people. I've never heard or seen the word gaol. And if I had, I'd probably assume it was "goal" misspelled. I make no assertions of being particularly smart or literate, but only typical.
Knowing the word exists is a different thing than using it in daily speech. I, and I'm sure most people, would be very surprised to hear there are populations of the USA where "gaol" is used regularly.
I apologise for mixing terms. Jail and Prison? Do you disagree this is a point of difference? Americans also don't seem to talk about being on remand. In police custody is unwieldy, I agree.
As int_19h notes, there are people (in the US) who believe that there is a difference between the meaning of the word "jail" and the meaning of the word "prison". And as int_19h also notes, those people are wrong; Americans will just be confused if you try to use the words differently. It's similar to the insistence of a group with near-perfect overlap that crimes for which jail time isn't a possible punishment can't be correctly referred to as "crimes".
British English as a language might, British people do not, and the physical facilities are the same. We say someone is “held on remand” if they are incarcerated pre-trial, and the part of the prison which holds prisoners pretrial is often referred to as the “remand wing”.
I feel like I've read, well not a lot, but a pretty decent amount. More than my average peer, probably.
I don't think I've ever once encountered "gaol" before today. Reading the parent comment, I believed it was a non-English language loanword, and probably a recent one at that, until I read the comments.
It's not like I avoid archaic works, either. It's possible I did come across the word at some point, but it was a one-off and without any repetition it faded quickly from my memory.
It is a very old jailbreak: Ye Olde Gaolbreak! One had to bribe the town constable with a ha’penny and a pint of mead just to install a third-party reading app. Dost thou even root, sir?
Gawdamn, whatever happened to a respectable old Mediatek vulnerability being exploited by a suspicious app on ya computer that called itself something funny like Kingoroot?
(Sidenote but I'm still impressed that thing would work without giving my computer half a dozen viruses)
"Tyre" is extremely common throughout most of the English speaking world. "Gaol" is used by attention-seeking Australians desperately hoping to kick off dumb threads like this.
Tyre is clearly the correct spelling. I quickly tire of anyone claiming otherwise. Gaol is an archaic spelling which I've found incredibly confusing ever since I was a small kid a long long time ago.
Prisons are where convicts go. Jails are where suspects awaiting trial go. People in prisons have been convicted and sentenced. People in jails might be proven guilty or not.
The simple rule you provide doesn't describe any real system; it seems to be an approximation drawn from how felony charges under state law in the US usually work, but more generally, in the US, Jails are local (usually county) facilities that both house suspects awaiting trial on state charges and convicts serving state misdemeanor sentences, while prisons are either state facilities that hold felony convicts or federal facilities that can house anyone from pre-trial detainees on federal charges to convicts on any kind of federal charges.
There are some variations among states, too; e.g., in California, some state felony convicts serve their sentence in county jails rather than state prisons.
I know, I lived in Australia for 5 years. That doesn't change the fact of my post - that in a thread about jailbreaking kindles, it's nothing but attention-seeking bait to use the term.
I have no problem with Australians, I think they're mostly great. Occasionally you'll get an obnoxious one who insists on inserting "gaol" into a conversation just to kick off an insanely stupid side thread.
I have to say, as an Australian, your reaction is making me want to use the spelling more often. We're generally culturally averse to people taking themselves too seriously!
Tbf as a Kiwi (currently in the UK) I see a lot of Australians, when interacting with other cultures, kick up their Australian-ness as much as they can; strengthening the accent, swearing way, _way_ more than they usually would, using "mate" "bloody" etc way more than they do just speaking to me.
I mean when two Australasians speak with each other in a foreign place I definitely hear the accent rise up a bit more outta the both of us but Aussies are something else when it comes to putting on a show, especially when Americans are involved (in my experience).
Pet peeve of mine but technically prison is for convicts, jail is for those yet awaiting a conviction but who aren't trusted to show up to court if allowed to roam freely. That the jail system (in the US especially) has essentially become a form of preemptive incarceration without the presumption of innocence is largely an artefact of the bond system, the overwhelmed courts and the perverse incentives in all of those systems from law enforcement to private prisons.
I realize the terms are often used interchangeably but I think the distinction is important especially because of the implications for presumption of innocence from conflating the two.
> Pet peeve of mine but technically prison is for convicts, jail is for those yet awaiting a conviction but who aren't trusted to show up to court if allowed to roam freely.
Pet peeve, but despite being a frequently claimed technical distinction, this is wrong both in terms of the strict definition of the terms and the way they are used as names of real institutions (though it is approximately true in most US state justice systems—but not the federal system—if you consider only felony crimes.)
> Merriam-Webster has it as "chiefly British spelling" of jail
It's odd that it doesn't mention it as archaic, because it's provably Just Not Used in the real world [0], but it's also an American dictionary, so all bets are off
If you click on the entry your search results give, it takes you to the entry for jail (eg: jail is the canonical noun it's using). Jail and gaol have slightly different routes into English, with gaol being via Northern French. Sez the OED:
> "remains as a written form in the archaic spelling gaol (chiefly due to statutory and official tradition); but this is obsolete in the spoken language, where the surviving word is jail, repr. Old Parisian French and Middle English jaiole, jaile. Hence though both forms gaol, jail, are still written, only the latter is spoken. In U.S. jail is the official spelling."
Finally, though, "jail" as a noun is pretty infrequent compared to "prison", which are the same thing in the UK (unlike the US), but the latter is much more common. The verb form on the other hand is almost always "jail", so when you are "jailed", you're sent to a prison.
> I believe Collins is the standard dictionary that British people use
And you would be wrong. They've only been putting out a dictionary since 1979. OED[0] is The Dictionary in the UK, and I've quoted its take on it in an adjacent comment.
Well, come on, that's obviously false. Zero percent of British people own an OED or even have the resources necessary to consult one when they want to look something up. It costs over a thousand US dollars.
I suspect fewer than 1% of British people own any paper English-language dictionary, but the sort of people who need a dictionary beyond what dictionary.com can offer will have online access through their employer, their institution, their local UK public library, or for the princely sum of £8/m for a personal account when paying annually.
Regardless, the authority that the OED holds on British English is best understood through the criticism section of it on Wikipedia, with people decrying its absolutely overwhelming influence:
> criticizing the OED is extremely difficult because "one is dealing not just with a dictionary but with a national institution", one that "has become, like the English monarchy, virtually immune from criticism in principle"
Many libraries in the UK and Commonwealth countries have the full volume set the first, second, or both editions of the OED.
I've routinely referenced it in both the university library and the local town library since 1980.
There's been a digital version of almost all of the second edition kicking about since just prior to the print release of the second edition - I have that on most computer images I own.
The OED offers digital subscription access to the second edition and to the in progress third edition which a good number of people, libraries, companies subscribe to.
It's the dictionary of reference for those serious about the English language.
I don't disagree that practically zero percent don't own a copy, but pretty much anyone in the UK can access the OED with a free library membership. It's pretty much the only thing I use my library card for these days.
If people do use a dictionary these days they most likely do use a Collins or Oxford Dictionaries (not the same as the OED). But I imagine that most people would just use a Google search and rely on the top box which itself is using Oxford Dictionaries for its definitions.
I suspect most people that go this route (ie download and manage their own ebooks, then transfer them to their Kindle) use Calibre, which afaik, is unaffected by this change.
A year ago, I bought an ebook via Amazon. When I received it, I was so shocked by the bad quality (e.g., low-res graphics like 300px) that I returned it and bought the same book on the publisher's website. Even though it cost exactly the same, it was like a completely different book, with mixed vector and pixel graphics that made sense and even without any noticeable DRM.
That day, I decided to stop buying ebooks at Amazon. So, who cares if they shut down the download feature? You still have a week to download everything you need, and then you better buy at shops that value their customers' wishes.
Does a jail broken Kindle allow me to remove the DRM from Kindle ebooks downloaded to it?
(I genuinely don't know. Until now, I've always downloaded Kindle purchases via ”Download and transfer via USB”, then stripped the DRM and transferred to the device with Calibre.)
It would allow another source to downloading them from the Amazon website (as that is going away) on to a PC where stripping software can (in some cases) be applied.
It also might (but might not) be a way for decryption keys to be extracted from devices for that purpose, but it doesn't automatically provide such an exploit.
> It would allow another source to downloading them from the Amazon website (as that is going away) on to a PC where stripping software can (in some cases) be applied.
Right.
I wonder how hard it is, or would be, to simply emulate whatever alternative channel the Kindle devices use to download Kindle ebooks from Amazon's servers.
Until now, there hasn't been much motivation to do so, since the "download and transfer via USB" in option existed. But now there obviously will be.
It's worth doing so on older kobo readers in my experience because it turns pages faster, and it also correctly displays embedded ePub fonts that the native software doesn't. I don't know how many of you will ever read books that feature APL glyphs so I don't know how relevant that last bit is, and I can't speak for more recent models.
stock kobo has two epub readers. trash one from adobe used for drmed files and stock epubs, and an actually good one for use with KEPUB files. There's a calibre plugin to make the conversion upon push to the device.
I was actually trying out KOReader (on Android via F-droid) last night and it... looks promising... but better than the Kindle app, really? It doesn't have a dark mode which is basically baseline for me reading at night. Or am I missing something?
E-ink screens usually don't want dark mode, because of the weird way they have to refresh[0]. The effect of that is much more visible with white text on black background compared to the opposite.
There's however a dark mode still if you need it; go to the gear icon, screen, auto warmth and night mode. Tap the mode line to switch it from automatic settings (either on time schedule or coordinates) to manual.
[0]: Basically, E-ink displays have to fully "reset" their screen by repeatedly toggling the pixels on and off, since they can't fully toggle themselves off normally; doing so will leave them with a bit of grey. Because this isn't very friendly on the eyes, most displays usually do this every couple "page changes" (actual pages when reading or moving in a menu.)
I've been reading at night for years on my Kindle, and dark mode works very well. During daytime you don't want to use it.
When you're using a device actually for reading, you don't care about minor defects on the page, just like you wouldn't care about some stain on the page of a paper book when reading it.
Thanks, I must have missed it, so that's the task when I go to bed tonight.
I hate the idea of my book collection being chained to Amazon by DRM, absolutely hate it. This whole DRM mess is one reason I haven't bought a dedicated e-reader.
Though, to be frank, it's not the only one, I spent a jaw dropping amount of money on a really good hardcover copy of The Lord of the Rings recently, and I feel like no ebook will ever come close to the reading experience of that thing. There is something about this immense, weighty, hardcover tome that just commands your attention and I still find that print on good paper causes less eye strain than even the e-ink screens I've used (though they are pretty good).
Yes, I also tried it on Android to see if it's worth jailbreaking my kindle and honestly the UI is a bit of a mess. It takes a lot of tweaks to get a nice looking layout to start with, out of the box it's just tiny text filling the screen with no margin.
For translation of more than a couple sentences on demand, you'd more likely translate the epub before you put it on the device, like with the Calibre plugin https://github.com/bookfere/Ebook-Translator-Calibre-Plugin . There are better solutions that have a dictionary for consistent name translations, too.
According to WMT 2014 benchmarks, GPT 4o and Gemini Flash 1.5 are acceptable. I think Gemini Flash 1.5 8B is the most used right now due to price. In my experience, it is pretty good except in name translation and consistency across text which is why pros use translation dictionaries. It will mostly translate idioms which is nice.
The amount of DRM and locking down Amazon bolts onto its ereaders and ebook formats feels insane to me. I can understand the profit motive but god damn.
> The amount of DRM and locking down Amazon bolts onto its ereaders and ebook formats feels insane to me. I can understand the profit motive but god damn.
I don't. I would be much happier buying ebooks without DRM and I would buy substantially more of them if they were DRM-free.
Kobo tells you when books have DRM and when they don't (at the bottom of the store page for each book). I'd recommend supporting them over Amazon any day.
Besides that, a lot of publishers who sell their own books do so without DRM by default. As does almost every book bundle hosted by Humble Bundle.
I am with you but we are a small minority. I literally don't know anyone IRL who cares about DRM. I doubt people like us factor into their decision making at all.
No, but I know people wondering why this can't play this video in 4k or why their offline downloaded videos stopped working and they get a pop-up telling them that they need to go online to re-validate them.
Yes, not many people know what DRM is but many of the effects are noticed when it ruins their experience.
I agree, however they probably assume it's their fault or something to do with this arcane black box they use but don't quite understand how it works.
For me, I bought a single DRM book against my better judgement because it was the only available way to get it quickly at the time. Predictably, I eventually lost access to it and never bought another one since.
I have never considered DRM on my Kindle, been using one for 15 years. I can buy any book on Amazon which is any book id be trying to read on this small format, and read it immediately for usually a maximum of $10. Never had want for more!
It benefits Amazon obviously, but otherwise it's a massive shame to ebooks as a whole. I was really excited about ebooks when they started, but DRM has completely stagnated the format so much that I've almost completely given up on ebooks now, and read hard copies instead unless I really want to read something and it isn't otherwise available.
What about the format is stagnant? I haven't read a physical book in roughly a decade, and haven't remotely found ebooks lacking.
And to be clear, I understand and agree with the moral objections to DRM. I think we have lost something more than just the loss of ownership and control. But while you're actually reading an ebook, none of that ever actually affects the experience.
I would love to see some more interactive fiction (like Twine) possible. Aside that though, I think formatting to me, seems constantly poor. I think you'd have a really hard time rendering something like Hope Mirles' Paris (you might need to google it!) in ebook form well.
The main formats are plenty powerful with the formatting they support. The bigger issue is that ebooks need to render on a pretty big variety of devices, and users can override typefaces and font size. So short of using a PDF to override those choices, there's not a ton that an improved format could accomplish.
Also, ebooks do support links (I see them most commonly used for linking to chapters from the table of contents, or linking to appendix notes), so you could make interactive fiction if you wanted.
You definitely had better foresight than me then! I wrote off a lot of the "your purchases might get yoinked" talk at the time as "it would never happen in reality", but have had this happen to ebooks I've bought.
It makes more sense if you think about it as something that they need to do in order to make sure that their marketplace attracts a wide range of publishing companies, some of which have very different perspectives on digital piracy, than as a way for them to retain a small percentage of revenue that DRM could theoretically protect.
You have to pay them $20 to not get served ads on the lockscreen on your device that already costs at least $100 and probably makes healthy margin like most electronic hardware. Straight up extortion fee.
I never buy ebooks from amazon because they come with drm (did once, it was annoying as hell to get it removed with downloading random python scripts and having to start a windows vm, never again). It obviously can't be to stop people copying, because all the books are available for free anyway, maybe publishers stupidly ask for it, but the most likely reason is that amazon wants you to read from their devices so they can show you ads for what you haven't bought yet.
What are some "killer" applications that would tempt the casual Kindle user to jailbreak the device?
I can see someone has ported syncthing [1], which could be convenient for syncing the contents of the device. But probably still too much work compared to using e.g. Calibre and a USB cable a few times per year.
The smallest margin on Kindle Scribe is too large. Changing text justification is not possible. Books cannot be uploaded directly with a USB cable without additional software (calibre). Gesture configuration (tap, two-finger tap, etc). Koreader can do everything you want and is significantly better than the stock reader. Unlike other vendors, kindle requires root to install it.
Support for epubs and RSS, much more responsive UI, night mode, Calibre integration + SSH server (you can send books over Wi-Fi), countless settings to adjust pretty much anything (for example, you can set margins to zero — the minimum margins on stock firmware are insane). The list goes on.
edit: found this link. I don't think this list is complete.
I like the boox devices, (they run a mostly stock Android that you can use the Google Play store and download whatever you want to them. Switched over from my Kindle a year ago and it's been fantastic)
Proper text justification (hyphenations + no ragged edges), auto toggle between day mode (black text on white page) and night mode (white text on black page) at sunset (via your location), compact progress display, customizable taps any gestures… it takes a little it to configure but it’s worthwhile.
I used a jailbroken kindle fire running lineage for years. I dropped that thing, got it wet, got it hot. It was impossible to kill. It finally had 1 drop to many but it was one of the best devices I ever had in terms of utility / $
Indeed. I had an original Kindle fire (back when it was still "Android") and I loved it great device for the money. It saddens me greatly how they've locked everything down. They could be the premier builders but instead I know then as grotesque authoritarians.
I find it exceedingly likely that they lose money on every kindle fire sold (at least during one of their regular sales), unless it causes more content sales. So the solution is of course to make it as useless as possible for anything else, otherwise they would just lose more. Same as inkjet printers.
I, for reasons nobody will wonder too hard about, have a downloads folder here with a few hundred Kindlebooks in .azw3 format. While non of them is quite as small as 91kb, many of then are around that 468kb size.
And they're whole goddamned novels that some talented author probably spend a whole year writing, not just single "small" webpages.
~10kb of that are for the client side search library ("lunr") and 50.7kb for that searchs index. So around 2/3 of the whole first load size are "just" for the local search feature.
The remaining 30kb split up in ~7kb of additional javascript, 16kb of stylesheets, and 7kb of html (content, markup, inline styles & scripts).
I am surprised by the amount of CSS, 109kb uncompressed but minified is a lot of styles for a rather simple design, but I guess its the "just-the-docs" standard and thus somewhat verbose by being generic.
> Not 50MB, that's not lightweight, which this thread is about.
I'm not sure what you're meaning to say to this but my point was that 50MB is absolutely humongous and so many websites are around that order of magnitude. 91kb is a lot smaller than it could be, even though it's not exactly absolutely small.
Still can't remove the stupid "cloud not available" nag if your kindle isn't online though, which of course it shouldn't be or they'll delete your copy of 1984.
The newer gen kindles nag you every time you go to the menu to change books, even in airplane mode. Maybe this can be turned off if you register it, but I'm tired of having to sign up to some company's ever-changing digital contract and arbitration just to read a book.
Specifically, it's a Fullscreen popover that says "cloud not available" which I of course know because it's in airplane mode! You pay 300 dollars and get treated like you're using their device instead of yours.
I could rant about how dramatically heavier the new Reddit UI is, but I'd be wasting my time - the people here should presumably know why making everything heavier isn't great
Or maybe they don't, as evidenced by this new Reddit link not being absolutely buried
I just wanted to express my support for KOReader—it’s a fantastic piece of software. I use it on my Kobo, and the UI is noticeably faster than the device’s default system. It also offers a wealth of customization options. This may not be an issue on newer e-readers, but the ability to highlight seamlessly across adjacent pages is truly liberating.
On a little technical side, the cross-platform engine of KOReader is developed in Lua and low level stuff like drawing and eInk specifics is different for every device. I think this separation might be very noticable for anyone running it on Android, almost no standard UI elements, dialogs, etc. But that's what makes this project so widespread device wise I think
It’s interesting reading that the reasons for jailbreaking a kindle are so trivial, amounting to adding some minor functionality to reading books and not much else.
Kobo jailbreaks from back in the day gave you root on a stripped down Linux install, complete with telnet ssh and ftp. You could even install python and essentially do anything the cpu/display permitted. Another cool aspect with those older kobos was that they had two microsd card readers… one hidden inside the enclosure that contained the OS, accessible without even needing a screwdriver.
I think you're mistaken, the Kindle is also Linux based and you can also do anything the cpu/display permits on a jailbroken Kindle. Most people install alternative reader software that supports more formats like epub, but you can do whatever. For a while I used an old Kindle as a "monitor" (connected over ssh) for a server that was otherwise headless. Obviously you can't do anything that moves too fast, but it was nice for doing simple maintenance & system monitoring tasks.
Yes, you can still do that. The only differences with modern Kobo devices are the loss of an external uSD slot and, on the latest modeks, the liss of the internal uSD slot.
I also have a hard time describing the process as jail breaking. Updates to the Kobo are simply unprotected zip files which contain firmware updates along with a gzipped tarball that contain updated files for the filesystem. Anyone with a knowledge of Linux can modify the software.
Ibalso consider the situation as rather stable. Not only has Kobo/Rakuten been ignoring modifications of the open source components for over a decade, they have been ignoring patches to the proprietary binaries.
I wish we could extract the kobo fonts so they could be used with koreader. I’ve found the fonts on the kobo root partition but they’re encrypted or otherwise obfuscated so simply copying the files doesn’t work :(
what are the main benefits of doing so?
I'm missing what's the deal with jailbreak in this case, using thee transfer via USB? what's the best thing i can do afterwards?
I use Koreader on my Kobo ereader for a few reasons:
- Much much faster than stock interface
- More customisable
- Comes with an ssh server. I load a static rsync binary and use rsync for syncing the library
- Much better for reading manga. Supports cbz, cbr format natively. Has the ability to clip empty space around the content to make reading on a small screen easier.
The devices are cheap (for what they are), the ebooks are cheap and most people are already neck deep in their ecosystem so being locked down isn't an issue to them.
Also, it's not like other ebook readers let you buy non-DRM versions of whatever books you like. Most popular ebooks have DRM of some kind.
Amazon's ecosystem. Every major publisher is on the kindle store and it's pretty much the first place any indie author self-publishes to. Kindle Unlimited has a pretty good selection of stuff for a flat subscription and (at least in the US) you can borrow e-books from your local library through libby and access them on the kindle.
The simplicity of it makes it really appealing to users who just want to read books and not think too much about it. Android e-readers also tend to have far worse battery life and higher-friction integration with the ecosystem.
I bought a Kindle Scribe recently because it was around $250 secondhand. That makes it the cheapest of all of the 10" e-readers available. It's perfect if you want to read textbooks, PDFs, and manga.
Household name + most people don't even know about ebook DRM so they never encounter that downside + it's the books that come with DRM; you can move pirated books to it just fine.
Thanks for your help. I've just tried it. It failed with “unexpected error” again --- I believe the first error I got was also this one. I'm not sure what I might be doing wrong.
I tried again. This time I chose “Set up later” after the factory reset, so that I don't have to waste time completing the steps after registration. I got a “Kindle Store is currently unavailable” error. This error is more likely to be the first error I got.
Edit: I finally got it working by trying one more time, without factory reset.
According to this section[1] of the website, the latest jailbreakable firmware for PW4 (10th gen) is 5.14.2.
Not sure where the title of this HN post came from, but given the jailbreak came out on Jan 1st, I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon has already patched the exploit for hardware they're still supporting.
This is good news, but I am curious about the Wifi requirement - is the jailbreak web-based? Is Wifi usable afterwards on Mesquito-jailbroken Kindles?
I know on my older jailbroken Kindles, the jailbreak is very fragile and they can no longer be connected to the internet, partly because of Amazon's agressive OTAs and partly because Amazon disables developer mode and hence the jailbreak every time my Kindle 4s touch the internet.
(PS. If anyone can suggest a way to prevent this and secure my jailbreaks, it would be much appreciated - I've tried 3 different OTA blockers and none work reliably)
I've tried renametoabin (the one mentioned by the Mesquite jailbreak Kindle Modding Wiki in the OP), BlockKindleOTA, ShutTheBackDoor, etc. all of which do more or less the same thing to attempt blocking OTA updates on the Kindle. None work to prevent the Kindle 4 from disabling the jailbreak as soon as it gets wifi access.
I could never get the rtc wake to work correctly in my kindles. For an eink dashboard, low power mode is critical. I ended up just buying a solde.red eink display. Very happy with my purchase. Did a write up about it here https://cdaringe.com/e-ink-dashboard/
Will this allow for more bluetooth options? For example connecting with bluetooth page turner would be a killer feature, but so far Kindle only allows for audio transfers via bluetooth.
Thank you so much. Kindle now looks so much better. KOreader indeed is the killer app. (little did I know that I could install it without jailbreaking).
I followed the instructions. It worked flawlessly. KOreader had a few issues, installing latest nightly fixed it. and I am thoroughly enjoying the uplevelled experience.
Before I swapped to Kobo I jailbroke my Kindle Voyage and installed Koreader on it. It was amazing.
I would have kept the voyage for longer but the micro-usb was killing me. That's the only reason, the battery was still holding on, it had turning page "buttons" (better than nothing) and an amazing screen.
First, KOReader uses its own fonts in addition to whatever fonts are installed on your device, so yes. Second, you can find and download Bookerly on the internet and put it in the fonts folder, so also yes.
my kindle oasis has been largely collecting dusk since I've got my kobo. I do really miss the buttons tho, perhaps this can prolong my buying a third device.
the only thing giving me pause is that I apparently have to register the kindle, which if possible, I'm sure I've avoided. any insight on why this is necessary?
I've done the opposite. While I love the openness of the kobo and the pocket integration, I end up using my kindle oasis more because of the form factor and because with the metal enclosure it feels better in my hand.
After having three Kindles I moved to Kobo, and it was much, much better in the compatibility side of things.
Now I am using a PocketBook and it is also great. The synchronization feature between browser, phone and the reader is very good, it is reason enough to have it instead of a Kindle.
Have you tried the remarkable and if so how does it compare? I don't think the remarkable 2 was anywhere near 60fps. But i think you can put nixos on it.
Is there a better way to block OTA updates than renametoabin? I've tried that and a few alternatives and none help with my Kindle 4s disabling the jailbreak whenever they get a whiff of internet.
Yes, it is technically possible, but it is occult knowledge. I don't know how. I know the one Kindle with ads I had, they somehow disappeared and never returned after I reset it, possibly because I did not connect it to any Amazon account or Wifi. You won't get any help with that aspect from any mainstream Kindle jailbreak devs or on MobileRead, as they follow a general policy of live and let live with Amazon. They don't get DMCAs on jailbreaks, they don't help people "pirate".
They don't do that anymore, at least not for me. I tried contacting two different support agents and both mentioned that the functionality has been removed for them by the higher-ups.
The constant anti patterns in how your library and even things in Amazon's interest like book reviews display are why I would do this, if I thought I could script or fix the changes away. Kindle is Doctorow's enshittification at scale.
I have a nice unregistered recent Kindle that I put books on via USB (I don't even give it WiFi access), and every single time I switch back to the main library to pick a new book to read it puts up a modal informing me that it doesn't have cloud access and prompts me to register. Quite annoying.
This and a hundred other snippets of mal behaviour. I have both calibre side loaded and on device, and it does not like the mixture one bit: they're just files. What's the beef?
To this day, the 3 is still my ideal version. Everything else since has fallen flat in some way in comparison. It was the right size, had paddle buttons for turning the page, had a passable keyboard, was responsive, could play audio, &c. It was excellent. I very much wish mine didn't die on me.
imagine if they pulled a slick double free in the bootloader heap and jacked up a custom rop chain to completely sidestep that rsa sig check. amazon ain’t gonna be happy.
Kobo are giving you root access with telnet from the start. You can flash modded firmwares, change the backend servers to phone your own calibre-web instance, install ssh, koreader and even a tailscale vpn on it. They even have UART pins labelled on their board. These are amazing devices to play with. And they read pretty much everything you throw on their storage: epub, cbz, cbr, pdf..
I moved to Kobo because I bought my partner the Kindle Oasis and just after a year the battery couldn't hold a charge. I contacted Amazon and they would only give me 10% off a new device. I only found one person on the internet who was courageous enough to open one up. The screen was epoxied to the body with no way of opening the device without destroying the screen.
So I got her a Kobo Libra H2O. Just as waterproof, significantly cheaper, and you can actually repair it. I ended up getting a Libra Colour for myself and love it.
This shows the decline in Amazon's customer service. I had several Kindles starting with Kindle Keyboard. At that time, Amazon's service was beyond amazing.
At one point, I had some issue with one of the Kindle while it was past 1 year. Amazon sent overnighted new Kindle for free when I was just hoping they give me some troubleshooting steps.
I stopped using Kindle about 4-5 years ago mostly because of all the bad press especially around them removing purchased books. Now I mostly buy paper books. I also use BOOX e-ink tablet to borrow books from library or newspapers. (BOOX is not ideal but there is no other choice of e-ink tablets that can let you use 3rd party apps, sadly.)
I'm on the BOOX train as well. I wanted a device that I could read books and catch up on HN on. Kindles do great with the former (if you're bought into their ecosystem) but suck badly for the latter. (Silk Browser is still too slow and renders all pages server-side with no ability to change this.) My BOOX Page 7 does everything I want and more, though I did choose to root and debloat it as well as install a firewall given the company's (ONYX) shady backgrounds.
My needs are unique, all of our needs are unique I suppose, but I want epub but also want to use the Kindle app (in cases of them being the only place to get a book).
I worry about firmware updates(security), but also my needs do not require the tablet being online constantly. So in a case like this, not a phone, not online, I only bring the wifi up to download books from Amazon via their Android app.
Otherwise, I copy epubs over via USB.
This is the middle ground.
I've been quite happy with the Meebook E-Reader M7.
thanks, i researched into this and bought a boox go color 7.
now i can have both the kindle app (for books i can't buy anywhere else or already purchased) and new books outside of kindle app. bonus, it has text to speech which kindle doesn't really want to let you do so it won't lower audible purchases. not the same quality as audoble, of course, but free.
This is rather terrible for supporting authors though. I read a lot of scifi from small authors who self publish on kindle direct publishing, and I would rather they get my money for their work.
And yes I can pay then find the epub (and not all are available, due to small author), but the experience is then much worse.
> rather terrible for supporting authors ... scifi from small authors who self
> publish on kindle ... I would rather they get my money for their work.
I would suggest you write them (each of them) a letter, or email, which:
1. Discourage them from publishing on an Amazon platform, explaining how Amazon, and DRM-laden reading, is terrible.
While this is right in theory, in practice I don't think you realize why those authors are there : discovery and ease of management. Your offer makes them lose both, for what gain from their POV ?
But Amazon DRM-laden reading isn’t terrible. I buy a book, it’s on my Kindle. With Kindle Unlimited, I can read tons of books for a fairly small monthly price.
So, I had a kindle, amazon prime, everything.. until the pandemic, and here in Norway we don't have an amazon webshop of our own. Up until this point I had been buying from Amazon US. The pandemic made shipping from the US hard, and so I decided to use AmazonUK, my login worked there, so i just switched to using that one. Then shipping from the UK became hard (brexit), so I started using AmazonDE.
Then Amazon locked my account, and said I needed to prove who I am. So I did, sent in documents to prove who I was. Didn't matter, apparently I had broken some rule about using my login in different amazon stores or something. Apparently I wasn't allowed to do that.
So now I lost all my books I had bought, because Amazon decided to ban me.
If I had bought these books from any open store, I would still have my books.. but because I bought from Amazon, I've lost them all.
The problem of supporting authors who actually want to be paid more than beer money (or any money, really) for their work, for one.
There's also the problem of moving those books onto another platform once Amazon directly affects you and you wish to move onto something else. (Amazon Unlimited DRM hasn't been broken yet.)
This is partially on the author, and I say this as somebody how writes as a hobby. It's not too difficult to publish on the Kobo store, and there are other stores out there. Of course, it's difficult to compete with Amazon when it comes to reach and to some small features, but they are no panacea either. For example, they don't support epub 3 with aural synchronized media, and they do something terrible to images embedded into ebooks that make them frankly useless. And they charge authors an outrageous amount for kilobyte of ebook content.
I believe Amazon impose a whole bunch of conditions on people publishing on their platform. Along the lines of exclusivity and controlling where else if at all you can sell it. I'm pretty sure Corey Doctorow extensively covered this.
Yes they do. One particularly annoying one is about pricing: price can't be zero. If you write as a hobby and don't care about making a dollar, then Amazon gets in the way. Sure, you can publish in Amazon and charge 1 USD, but then you can't publish your book on your own website for free because it goes against Amazon's TOS.
There are other peeves. Covers for example: it's against the TOS to have a cover that shows female nipples, but it's okay to show male nipples. Beyond the sexism of the rule, I'm worried that the way to enforce this is to have some ML system checking all the covers and making judgements about nipples. Which means you have to ask your cover artist to not draw anything that may accidentally look like the wrong kind of nipple \o/ .
... but this does not replicate the kindle one-stop store experience.
and looking on the kobo store doesn't help either, i wanted the experience for someone who actually migrated from kindle. i may find the books i'm looking for now, but what are the struggles for people who actually used it? do they come later than kindle, are they using multiple shops, etc.
edit; yes, i know about the pirating options. i'm not talking about those.
Kobo in my experience has all the books from big publishers, the publishers that publish paper books too. What they do not have is the stuff from Kindle Direct Publishing. This is stuff people have self-published on Kindle, I think Amazon requires exclusivity when you do that too?
In my opinion this is actually more of a blessing than a curse since I consider 99% of that garbage I don't want to sift through.
Sometimes multiple store headaches are still a necessity depending on region. Even on Amazon.
If there's no DRM-free version available to purchase, I buy from the kobo store (it's very easy to access different region stores which can impact book availability) and I then remove the DRM. Library genesis is also an option, of course.
What are the prices compared to Amazon's? Books are generally cheaper here in the subcontinent. I did a price comparison of 30 books and found out that Kindle editions cost significantly lesser than Kobo. And Kobo editions cost slightly higher than paperbacks.
The total amount for these 30 randomly selected books came to:
Paperback price: ₹13,017 (~$149)
Kobo price: ₹13,252 (~$152)
Kindle price: ₹9,171 (~$105)
I found that it's often best to use google search to search the kobo store. Books sometimes have multiple editions with significant price differences. Not sure if it would make a difference in this case.
What other popular stores exist? And I assume you sideload those books to Kobo afterwards? In that case, is the experience of reading sideloaded books inferior to that of reading store bought books?
I don't know if it still works, but the last time I checked it was possible to un-DRM (de-DRM?), and convert amazon format to normal epub, and read it everywhere
Depends on which version of the DRM. KFX hasn’t been broken yet. It’s been a bit of a cat-and-mouse game where the DeDRM people make some progress then Amazon tweaks something and they have to start over. There are some workarounds that involve getting Amazon to give you an older version of the file, but then you lose the typography improvements present in later versions of Amazon’s ebook format.
ebooks.com has loads of books on the platform, though they're DRMed. libby's great also.
no need to be locked into kindle anymore.
transferring books is also easy. you can install Calibre on your computer, connect the Kindle to it via USB and transfer. if you're into self-hosted, you can run Calibre on a server, either as an installed binary or in a container, and send books to it via email or dropbox.
I got a Kindle (moving on from an absolutely ancient rooted Nook) purely because the Oasis looked so nice
I'll never get a Kindle again because I was blown away by how impossible it was to repair (plus the closed system really sucks). Mine broke for no reason at all a bit ago; my best guess is the battery started to swell inside it and that broke the screen.
Got a Forma super cheap ($25!) and I've been super happy with it, feels a bit cheaper but it's actually got some level of grip. Have read more on it in a month than I did on my Kindle in the last 3 years.
Haven't even dabbled into the custom tools stuff much but it all sounds great. Might get a cheap secondary one to play with, can become an (outdated) offline Wikipedia reader if nothing else.
Just got really lucky. Someone hadn't a clue what they were selling, was listed as "Kobo e reader" or something very vague like that. Fully expected it to either be broken or not match the image.
In general the Forma looks overpriced imo, the benefits of the 8 inch screen don't really warrant a price that nears the Libra Color or Sage.
For the record, my Kindle died after 4 years and Amazon replaced it. That one died after 2 and they replaced it again - all free. Australian Consumer Law is required to be followed if they want to trade here. If you want respect, speak to your lawmakers.
I thought 4 years is not bad at all but it’s even better because „consumer guarantee rights under the Australian Consumer Law, … don’t have a specific expiry date“ and „apply for a period of time that is considered reasonable having regard to the nature of the products or services“[0].
ACL is fantastic, gotten my 2017 MacBook Pro 15" fixed multiple times for free even out of applecare, last time it was fixed, it was 6 years old. Had issues with the keyboard, and the screen. Seems to be a common issue with this model.
Here in Mew Zealand we have the consumer guarantees act. Stuff needs to last for a duration commensurate with its price. Nice and vague and super good for the consumer.
An iPhone can generally get fixed under warranty for 2-3 years. I’ve never tried a Kindle but the premium model should get 2 years without too much fuss.
Consumer protections in the UK and EU means they have to last a reasonable length of time, and if not you get a proportional refund (or repair, or replace). I've had refunds from devices several years old.
Yes, every device should fail immediately upon warranty expiration.
You should build a company founded on that principle.
Call it GTL Pty Ltd
Formerly known as Guaranteed To Last, but they dropped that naming and are now know simple as GTL after a social media smear campaign where people were saying ‘guaranteed to be the last thing you ever buy from that company’.
Oh, come on, they could totally own that smear campaign. "Guaranteed to be the last [class of device] you ever buy, unless you give it away." Something something heirlooms, put together a simple, 30-second narrative for the advertisement campaign, job done.
12 months is a laughable amount of time. Sadly, companies have normalized such short periods of time, so much so that everybody would give me looks when I say that 5 or 10 years would be more appropriate. Especially tech folks, so I'm expecting pushback in a forum like HN.
My in-laws have a few kitchen appliances from the 80s. Still working rock-solid. Not the wifi-enabled modern crap with some shitty cloud-based app that you need to replace all the time.
That's kinda my point. Two years are better than one, but celebrating it as the achievement is really missing the bigger picture (and is a great success of lobbying work)
Would be normal/natural if we could change the batteries and not throw away devices when the battery fails even more natural when the device is not dirt cheep.
I moved from Kindle to Kobo for the sole reason that the backlight had tunable color temperature. I've ended up liking it for lot of reasons, including how open they are.
Kindle Paperwhite (and possibly others) have adjustable colour temperature too, with time-based automation. From a quick squizz, not quite the same as the Kobo (I don't think it has the "more blue in daytime" function) but just noting that it does exist on some in some fashion.
It's great that Paperwhite have caught up to Kobo in this manner. Back when I was evaluating replacing my (lost) Kindle I believe it was only an option on the top tier ($300+) Kindle.
I love Kobo for that. I hooked UART with a Variometer (measure rate of climb in aircraft) and use it in glider soaring as a flight computer (good contrast on sunny day)
I have a remarkable 2 and really like it, but my wife needs a new "Kindle" and I'd rather cut my finger off than pay Amazon to abuse me. Looking forward to trying out the kobo
The actual experience of reading is quite good, but, it is not really fully-featured for EPUBs.I was trying to reflow text into a different font and size yesterday and it took forever. I ended up giving up. It is, however, quite hackable, and `rmapi` on GitHub allows you fine control of its (linux) system.
Nope, though possibly with a custom workflow, it might be.
I own a Kindle Scribe, Paperwhite (a couple versions) and reMarkable 2, and while I promise myself to set up an easier experience for using reMarkable for reading and then selling the Scribe, I didn't find the time so they "got me".
It has no backlight, which I would find annoying, but i know someone who has read tens of thousands of pages on the remarkable 2. It's easy enough to copy epubs and pdfs to it though, and the screen is big which helps.
Personally, I find it to be an excellent ebook reader. Easy to navigate, and works well with epubs and PDFs. I like to highlight and annotate on books as I read, and to me that is an absolutely killer feature that the remarkable allows me to do. It also saves a separate copy with the annotations so you aren't marking up your original, which is something I really love.
Devices made specifically to be e-readers are usually a bit less friction. but to me, The openness and hackability of the remarkable and it's excellent feature set for writing makes it an excellent choice.
I have a reMarkable 2. It's better as a book annotator than a book reader, IMO. It's fine for my use case (reading during rest periods while at the gym), but I wouldn't use it as a full-time reader, as it can get quite slow and doesn't have very many eReader features.
The Kobo Libra Colour has the best UX of a device I own, in that it's completely invisible. I can just read my damn books, highlight passages I think are noteworthy and save words I like the sound of. Everything just works, and the high seas experience is seamless.
I’ve recently looked into buying a replacement Kindle. In the end the Kindle hardware looks and feels much more premium with the display being even with the frame.
I hope there’s new models coming from Kobo that address that soon.
I recently had a very bad experience with Kobo.com. Bought an ebook thinking I could simply download and view it on computer. haha was I naive... I could not download it from the website, instead the download gave me some XML file for some Adobe shit app, which would then download it. But I did not sign up to download and install Adobe shit on my machine. So another option is using the Kobo app. But guess what... they don't have it for GNU/Linux. And I thought maybe I can use it with WINE, but their friggin download link for the app did not even work in Firefox, even when allowing all the third party crap they put on that page to load. So that way was also blocked. OK, I thought, let's get it refunded then. But good luck!!! finding any kind of support e-mail address! All their docs and links brought me back to their chat bot, which did not help me and instead always directed me to the docs again.
Worse, they have the audacity to state on their pages that only some ebooks are eligible for a refund and to find out whether yours is, they send you back into the docs and chat bot loop. I guess they don't want people to refund, so they made finding any contact info especially difficult.
How to make a real shitty user experience 101, presented to you by kobo.com. With this it is clear to me, that I will never again buy any ebooks from them. For anyone, who does not own their Kobo device already, I say hands off this one! Maybe buy the book and download a DRM free ebook from ... elsewhere. That way you pay, can have a clean conscience and enjoy your ebook.
Kobo has the same thing. Buy books on Kobo and they are on your device. But they also support ePub natively and ADE DRM natively so there's more options of where to source books before conversion.
Kindles have literally always behaved like that, from the beginning.
The very newest generation of Kindle changed the storage protocol from traditional mass storage (which was compatible with everything) to MTP, which is mildly annoying for Mac users, but it is still intended to just show up as a flash drive.
I love my Kobo reader and am happy with switching to it after a decade or more of daily Kindle use. But I think it is important to not over-sell it. It has had certain unexpected frailties, such as corrupting the database when I neglected to eject the USB device before pulling the cable, something that resulted in losing my notes and current progress. I also had to learn about the Kobo ePub format and install a Calibre plugin to get that working, otherwise some ePub files would rapidly drain the Kobo battery. I did not expect bad html/css to significantly affect battery life. I'm not sure I would recommend it to an older person or someone who doesn't have a little patience for tinkering.
I had no idea the extent that Kobos allow you to do these sort of things. Heavily considering a Kobo as my next e-reader once my PW3 gives ups. Is there a good starting resource for Kobo modifications like you mentioned?
We also have the amazing Plato reader, like koreader but with a snapper UI and made exclusively for kobo and written in Rust by the guy responsible for bspwm.
No ads per se, but a recommendation tile and a kobo plus subscription tile on the main screen that just eats display space for nothing. I mainly use kobopatch to change the epub reader margins, get the page remaining in a chapter and block firmware updates and a few other details. Totally optional, it's just pure nitpicking here. Here is all my kobo modding work in this repo, you can also find what firmware mods are available...
Newer devices apparently use secure boot and prevent modding the firmware, causing the developers of the Inkbox/Quill alternative distro to abandon the entire project:
https://github.com/Quill-OS/quill
What you can't do on Kobo is use the page up and down buttons to scroll in the web browser unless you go through the effort of installing the cross-compiling toolchain and building a display server and a browser.
I bought a pretty early Kobo like 10+ years ago and found myself very underwhelmed with the software situation. I sold it and went back to my kindle.
Maybe it's time to take a second look. The hacker in me's interest is piqued.
Frankly though, the biggest thing that keep me on Kindle these days I suspect are hard to replicate. For example, automatic audio book/kindle sync where I can switch back and forth, listening to the audio book in my car and reading at home in bed. For two, read.amazon.com where I can read from my locked down work machine without installing anything. The whole whispersync ecosystem.
There are also the onyx boox models, many run android, and it seems like you can install whatever you want. I have no experience with them myself, but I am curios.
I really like my old Kobo, but I was a tad disappointed when I had to swap the screen. It's a very shoddy build. The screen is glued to the board and the battery is soldered. I felt like it was made to break when you try to open it.
I switched from Kindle to Kobo and out of the box it would hard-crash within a few minutes of using it, every single time. You have to pry the case off and remove the internal battery hard reboot it. I sent it in, waited 2 months for a replacement, and the new one (with new firmware) does the exact same thing.
I despise Amazon as a brand but nothing comes close to the kindle hardware wise. Waterproof, indestructible, and never had it crash.
KOReader on Kindle Scribe 2022: https://imgur.com/a/oYshWxI
KOReader is so good for reading PDFs, compared to the native reader, I’m very impressed. Supports proper landscape mode (where swiping to next page moves to the second half of the current page, THEN next swipe gets you to the first half of the next page), supports auto-rotation, support auto-cropping of PDFs with controllable margin (killer feature), supports contrast adjustments, … It does not support handwritten annotations, but for just reading PDFs - it’s perfect.
I always found KOReader to be too fiddly for ePubs, has that changed recently or have I been doing it wrong? I want a set of sane defaults to be applied to every book, I don’t want to tweak every book individually. This leads to distraction for me
You can set defaults for all books. Simply long press on the option you want to be a global default. That said, it can still be fiddly since different books respond in different ways. Most of that seems to be due to differences in how publishers handle formatting, but I'm fairly certain that some of it is due to how the renderer handles things.
It’s still the case in my opinion. Yes, you can fiddle to make it work. You can set sane defaults. The heuristics for applying styles etc apparently are not clever enough because sometimes you still get strange results. Comparing it to the default Kobo reader is like using a Mac vs a Linux DE. As I’ve gotten older I find I no longer enjoy tweaking every possible parameter :)
I’m happy with native Kindle for reading ePubs. I use KOReader for PDFs only at the moment.
Can you still use the full functionality of the Scribe's pencil? (highlight text, drawing or writing notebooks, etc.) Thanks.
I can still use Kindle Scribe exactly the same as before the Jailbreak. Think of it this way - before it had Library (for reading and annotating Kindle books) and Notebooks (for writing). Now it has a third thing - KOReader (for reading only, KOReader doesn’t support handwriting annotation).
Which book is being read in that screenshot? Looks interesting. I did a few searches based on the text and couldn't find it.
My friend wrote it. I’m reading a draft. I’ll ask him if he’s willing to share more broadly, but it’s probably too early
I have a lot of PDFs and this is the most interesting. Do you use the Calibre KOReader add-on to sync and manage? Does that work well? Do deletions of books sync? Does highlighting annotation work/sync fine? I would make the move just for that alone since SendtoKindle is kind of basic.
I didn’t get that advanced yet. I’m trying to figure out the Dropbox integration at the moment. I don’t use Calibre. I know highlighting works (I’ve annotated the PDF I’m reading), but I didn’t test highlights export / sync yet.
Does it have rotation lock? That's my single biggest pet peeve about the Kindle Scribe.
You can turn of accelerometer in settings and control the rotation manually via the menu
I revived my old kindle pw7 using this a week or so ago. If you have an old kindle lying around, you can use it as an e-ink weather dashboard (or anything else for that matter, as long as you can convert it into a 8bit greyscale image).
https://terminalbytes.com/reviving-kindle-paperwhite-7th-gen...
My old kindle is a Kindle 3 from 2010, and it's still my primary e-ink reader. I still haven't found a compelling reason to upgrade.
Only upgrade I did from my old kindle paper white was to a water-sealed version. Really nice to take it to the beach or a pool then just hose it off when I’m done so it doesn’t have sand and such everywhere. Just less stressful to carry around in general.
USB-C on the newer Paperwhites (and base Kindles? IDK if those changed over yet), in case you just want all your (portable) gear to be USB-C.
What is extremely annoying is people constantly and universally lauding the Kindle for Kids option, when it is only offered in the US. Or, at least, its barely offered in the EU.
I replaced the USB port on my older kindle with a USB-C port when I did the same for a bunch of devices. Not an option for everyone but if you have the time and patience (and a little skill) I highly recommend it.
Those USB-C to microUSB adapters are handy, I keep one in my backpack since my camera and some other things are microUSB.
I gave up on my first paperwhite last year (10+ years old). Would randomly lose its charge, which was annoying when bringing it on trips (and often not having an old micro-usb charger lying around). And from being stuck into all kinds of pockets and bags without a protector (half the use was it fitting in my pants) had seriously scratched up the screen. The new one I got is nice, but other than the old one being beaten up, I don't notice much difference. A bit faster to click around, but in the end it's mostly the same.
Mine would have longer and longer delays on each page turn when I started using it again last year. It's a 10+ years Paperwhite as well.
I jailbroke it and installed KOReader. Suddenly, no delays, great interface, wi-fi sync with Calibre. I might replace the battery one day, but it still lasts 2-3 books.
Books as a unit of time. Interesting :D.
Not sure what my old kindle version was, it had a keyboard though, but I upgraded eventually because I wanted a warm toned backlight. It's nice that the newer ones are a bit snappier too.
> Your Kindle must have a valid, internet-connected WiFi network saved to it that it can connect to during steps 8 to 10 (inclusive)
So only Kindle 3+ with keyboards work with this method, the early ones were whispernet only.
I upgraded from Kindle Keyboard to Kindle 2023 last year. Backlight is very nice and I appreciate its lighter weight, but otherwise it's pretty much the same.
Yup yup yup. I cracked my keyboard and got a paperwhite. I love the dark mode for late night reading but would probably go back to a refurbished keyboard in the face of any strife; just like the old form factor more.
I find the Kindle keyboard pretty much perfect.
Even the battery surgery wasn't that hard and fixed the only problem mine had.
Unfortunately your Kindle needs to be registered to do this, and it's often a phenomenal pain in the ass to get old Kindles to register, if it's possible at all. I've got two old Paperwhites and I can't get either of them to register despite trying for hours and hours with every troubleshooting step I've found.
Thanks for the shout out to kindle-dash! <3 Great looking dashboard you have there!
Thanks for sharing this! I'm working on a very similar project, and the bit about disabling sleep/built-in services was very helpful.
Nice to see a good write up. I did the same a year ago, it refreshes every hour (except night) and battery needs to be charged every 24-25 days.
i love this! unfortunately I'm still using my old pw for reading, I'll have to buy a second used one for this project
Kindles have long had a history of gaolbreaks. I've scarcely seen a scene as dedicated as the folks over on the MobileRead Forums (https://www.mobileread.com/forums). I notice many of the names associated with this new break as people who were associated with hacking early Kindles back in the early 2010s.
For context, it's been a little while since we've had a fresh gaolbreak for new Kindles. Last one was LanguageBreak, which came out back in 2023 and required firmware 5.16.2.1.1 or lower.
Mate, I’m Australian and even I think a gaol is just a dyslexic watching soccer.
Only Americans (to the extent I know) differentiate jail and gaol. Jail and prison.
I first read gaol in a 1960s kids book by Randolph Snow. An Australian as it happens.
https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/1496448
I'm an American and I don't differentiate between jail and gaol; I just assumed the latter to just be a funny European spelling of the former.
But yes, we do differentiate between jail and prison - the former usually being for those with short sentences or for those awaiting trial, and the latter being for those with long sentences. Interesting that other countries don't maintain that distinction - but I guess most countries don't have such a sprawling prison-industrial complex to warrant separate short-term v. long-term detention classifications.
The American distinction is jail v prison.
In practice, the distinction is overblown.
Jails do hold long term prisoners, and prisons get pre-trial prisoners too.
There’s literally a market for jail beds. So prisoners are often sent where there’s an open spot, with little distinction between “short term” and “long term”.
A better distinction is that jails are run by a law enforcement agency, while prisons are not.
France also has the same distinction. "maison d'arret" = jail, "centre de detention" = prison.
the word "prison" however (that also exist in French) is a generic term for both.
It also has "geôle", which is also old fashioned.
Interesting!
Your distinction is probably a better one, but the one I've heard is lockups hold temporarily from hours-days, jails hold prisoners for sentences up to a year, prisons for over a year. People might end up in a jail for much longer, but normally they don't.
I did say "usually" :)
> A better distinction is that jails are run by a law enforcement agency, while prisons are not.
Depends on whether you count corrections agencies as law enforcement agencies. On the one hand, I'm pretty sure all states have distinct agencies for police v. prisons, but on the other hand, corrections officers are usually sworn peace officers and therefore would count as "law enforcement".
Another distinction, come to think of it, is that prisons are usually under federal or state agencies¹, while jails are usually under county or municipal agencies.
----
¹ The only exception I've found is Chester County Prison in Pennsylvania, which is under the Chester County Dept. of Corrections. Wikipedia also has an article on a "Northampton County Prison" (also in PA), but that county's website calls it the "Northampton County Jail"; on a tangential note, if corrections agencies don't count as law enforcement agencies, then the Northampton County Jail would be an exception to the "jails are run by a law enforcement agency" rule.
A county jail is commonly used for defendants accused of state crimes until their sentencing, after their convictions.
Post conviction, the prisoner will be moved to a state penitentiary to serve out their sentence.
I don't know how these distinctions work at the federal level.
Depends on the state. Some states “allow” prisoners to serve short sentences in jail. Including short consecutive sentences, so, long sentences.
Dictionary essay of the difference between the two words: https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/jail-vs-prison-diffe...
It's true that prison is an industry in America, but it's also true that only a small minority of prisoners are held in private prisons; about 8% of federal and state prisoners are in private prisons.
The prison industry isn't limited to private prisons; there is substantial private industry financial interest in the operation of the public prisons, as well, whether its providing services to a literally captive market, benefiting from prison labor, etc.
Sorry to parse words, but I said prison “market.”
Most of the customers are states that need to put a prisoner somewhere, and most of the sellers are states that have a spare cell somewhere.
It’s mostly government to government sales.
I agree concern over private prisons is overblown. The very idea conjures up Dickensonian workhouses. Not quite the reality.
Seeing your comment, and all the comments that follow, is reminding me of the "Misconceptions developers believe about X" posts that circulate on here occasionally.
It seems like there's a lot of beliefs that don't universally apply.
TIL…
> Only Americans (to the extent I know) differentiate jail and gaol. Jail and prison.
You inhabit a very different reality than everybody else. Americans do not differentiate jail and gaol; Americans don't use the word "gaol" under any circumstances, ever. It is not a part of American English.
American here. Never seen the word written before.
It's a common spelling in fantasy video games and books, but it feels kind of performative.
These same games will have voice actors pronounce "ye" as it's written, unaware that the y is a typographic substitute for Þ. "ye olde" is pronounced "the old". But likewise, there's some VAs that clearly only ever read a word, like in the newer God of War games where a character mangles "prescient".
Same had to actually look it up and at least Merriam-Webster lists the word as “chiefly British spellings of JAIL, JAILER”. Which at least hints that the dictionary writers thought it is less common out side of Britain.
It's the traditional spelling. You'll see it in the British Isles, and on some old buildings here in Canada.
Though it does exist, 'gaol' very infrequently used in the UK too.
Obviously, you haven't visited any colonial American sites. It used to be the normal spelling.
I've also seen the spelling used in old westerns, which I just so happened to be reading in jail.
Non-native speaker here and I learned the word gaol from some fantasy literature only a couple years back.
American here (another) but also Irish (moved here in my 20s)…
Americans never use ‘gaol’. It’s rarely used in Ireland but definitely a term there.
I dropped out in the first semester of 9th grade and even I know the word gaol, because I read books written before last year.
I graduated from high school and even got a bachelor's degree. I've read several books written before last year, and have talked to dozens of people. I've never heard or seen the word gaol. And if I had, I'd probably assume it was "goal" misspelled. I make no assertions of being particularly smart or literate, but only typical.
Yes, but how often do you use it in your vernacular?
Since that's the topic being discussed, then first portion of your statement wasn't necessary.
It's the same word, just an alternate spelling which is now defunct.
Knowing the word exists is a different thing than using it in daily speech. I, and I'm sure most people, would be very surprised to hear there are populations of the USA where "gaol" is used regularly.
That's not true. Plenty of ill-behaved FFXI players (myself included) once served time in Mordion Gaol.
https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/Mordion_Gaol
I apologise for mixing terms. Jail and Prison? Do you disagree this is a point of difference? Americans also don't seem to talk about being on remand. In police custody is unwieldy, I agree.
"jail" and "prison" are the American English words in question.
Although that distinction is rarely relevant in casual conversation in practice. People say "jail" and mean "prison" all the time.
As int_19h notes, there are people (in the US) who believe that there is a difference between the meaning of the word "jail" and the meaning of the word "prison". And as int_19h also notes, those people are wrong; Americans will just be confused if you try to use the words differently. It's similar to the insistence of a group with near-perfect overlap that crimes for which jail time isn't a possible punishment can't be correctly referred to as "crimes".
While they are often used interchangeably, it is not uncommon for people to make the distinction between jail and prison in the US.
It can definitely come across as a “Frankenstein’s monster” type of pedantic correction, but they truly do mean two different ideas in the US
There's a confusion here. Gaol is simply a rarely used (I would say archaic) spelling of jail. It does not mean prison.
British English also differentiates jail and prison, by extension I assume that's universal.
British English as a language might, British people do not, and the physical facilities are the same. We say someone is “held on remand” if they are incarcerated pre-trial, and the part of the prison which holds prisoners pretrial is often referred to as the “remand wing”.
I feel like I've read, well not a lot, but a pretty decent amount. More than my average peer, probably.
I don't think I've ever once encountered "gaol" before today. Reading the parent comment, I believed it was a non-English language loanword, and probably a recent one at that, until I read the comments.
It's not like I avoid archaic works, either. It's possible I did come across the word at some point, but it was a one-off and without any repetition it faded quickly from my memory.
Am I a one-off?
I got like 740 on the verbal SAT and I’ve never seen it
I'm new to kindle, I've been into this since 2021 so im not so aware of kindle's jailbreaking history. Can you tell me what gaolbreak is?
It is a very old jailbreak: Ye Olde Gaolbreak! One had to bribe the town constable with a ha’penny and a pint of mead just to install a third-party reading app. Dost thou even root, sir?
Gawdamn, whatever happened to a respectable old Mediatek vulnerability being exploited by a suspicious app on ya computer that called itself something funny like Kingoroot?
(Sidenote but I'm still impressed that thing would work without giving my computer half a dozen viruses)
Gaol is an archaic spelling of jail, that retains the same pronunciation and meaning as jail :)
So “gaol” is supposedly an alternative way to spell “jail” that I first encountered in a video game.
I keep seeing “tyre” on here too. I guess hn is hipster for alternative spellings.
"Tyre" is extremely common throughout most of the English speaking world. "Gaol" is used by attention-seeking Australians desperately hoping to kick off dumb threads like this.
Tyre is clearly the correct spelling. I quickly tire of anyone claiming otherwise. Gaol is an archaic spelling which I've found incredibly confusing ever since I was a small kid a long long time ago.
Tyre is clearly the correct spelling for the city in Lebanon. ~
Oh, it‘s in Lebanon? I think it‘s mostly known for being in Civ 5.
In Australia, gaol is far more common than jail. Neither are used anymore really. It's more often just prison or penitentiary.
Some of Australia's more popular historical sites are old gaols.
Strictly speaking Australia doesn't seem to have jails, although some "Community Correction Centers" serve the purpose of jails (i.e. holding suspects before trial): https://vanessaash.com.au/whats-the-difference-jail-and-pris...
Prisons are where convicts go. Jails are where suspects awaiting trial go. People in prisons have been convicted and sentenced. People in jails might be proven guilty or not.
The simple rule you provide doesn't describe any real system; it seems to be an approximation drawn from how felony charges under state law in the US usually work, but more generally, in the US, Jails are local (usually county) facilities that both house suspects awaiting trial on state charges and convicts serving state misdemeanor sentences, while prisons are either state facilities that hold felony convicts or federal facilities that can house anyone from pre-trial detainees on federal charges to convicts on any kind of federal charges.
There are some variations among states, too; e.g., in California, some state felony convicts serve their sentence in county jails rather than state prisons.
I know, I lived in Australia for 5 years. That doesn't change the fact of my post - that in a thread about jailbreaking kindles, it's nothing but attention-seeking bait to use the term.
Geeze, Louise! Did a Koala mercilessly bully you while you were there, mate?
I have no problem with Australians, I think they're mostly great. Occasionally you'll get an obnoxious one who insists on inserting "gaol" into a conversation just to kick off an insanely stupid side thread.
I have to say, as an Australian, your reaction is making me want to use the spelling more often. We're generally culturally averse to people taking themselves too seriously!
I did a tour in OIF with Aussie air force troops. I love that about Aussie culture. That and the drinking :-D
Also Australian, would never have thought to spell it like "gaol" these days but seconding this.
Tbf as a Kiwi (currently in the UK) I see a lot of Australians, when interacting with other cultures, kick up their Australian-ness as much as they can; strengthening the accent, swearing way, _way_ more than they usually would, using "mate" "bloody" etc way more than they do just speaking to me.
I mean when two Australasians speak with each other in a foreign place I definitely hear the accent rise up a bit more outta the both of us but Aussies are something else when it comes to putting on a show, especially when Americans are involved (in my experience).
More likely a dropbear.
Penitentiary? Maybe it is as a your-state thing?
Never heard of it down here in NSW, and I worked with Police, Justice Department, Juvi, and the rest of police to prison pipeline.
You're probably right. I was thinking of "Correction Centre" or other terms.
"tyre" is just UK English
As is gaol
I did some googling and it turns out "gaol" was indeed the more popular spelling, but only up until 1960 when "jail" took over; numbers: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gaol%2Cjail&ye...
As a life long englishman, this thread is the first time i've encounterd "gaol" as a word. Not an english spelling.
P G Wodehouse uses the term, I’m fairly sure.
Brit here. Nobody here says "gaol" in normal speech or writing. Usually "prison", sometimes "jail".
How do you know if they SAY jail or gaol given they're pronounced the same, being alternate spellings of the same word?
Nobody writes/uses I can concur. The pedantry here, is somewhat apposite surely?
Fair enough. No one writes it then. Although it could be a world thats only ever spoken. If there is such a thing.
I could tell you more words that are only ever spoken, but not here.
Pet peeve of mine but technically prison is for convicts, jail is for those yet awaiting a conviction but who aren't trusted to show up to court if allowed to roam freely. That the jail system (in the US especially) has essentially become a form of preemptive incarceration without the presumption of innocence is largely an artefact of the bond system, the overwhelmed courts and the perverse incentives in all of those systems from law enforcement to private prisons.
I realize the terms are often used interchangeably but I think the distinction is important especially because of the implications for presumption of innocence from conflating the two.
> Pet peeve of mine but technically prison is for convicts, jail is for those yet awaiting a conviction but who aren't trusted to show up to court if allowed to roam freely.
Pet peeve, but despite being a frequently claimed technical distinction, this is wrong both in terms of the strict definition of the terms and the way they are used as names of real institutions (though it is approximately true in most US state justice systems—but not the federal system—if you consider only felony crimes.)
I see gaol a lot here in New England historic places. There are plenty of old crumbling "town gaols" and such.
Which dictionary are you using that doesn’t mark it as an archaic form in British English?
Merriam-Webster has it as "chiefly British spelling" of jail, and Oxford English Dictionary has it as a "variant".
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gaol
https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?q=gaol
> Merriam-Webster has it as "chiefly British spelling" of jail
It's odd that it doesn't mention it as archaic, because it's provably Just Not Used in the real world [0], but it's also an American dictionary, so all bets are off
> https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?q=gaol
If you click on the entry your search results give, it takes you to the entry for jail (eg: jail is the canonical noun it's using). Jail and gaol have slightly different routes into English, with gaol being via Northern French. Sez the OED:
> "remains as a written form in the archaic spelling gaol (chiefly due to statutory and official tradition); but this is obsolete in the spoken language, where the surviving word is jail, repr. Old Parisian French and Middle English jaiole, jaile. Hence though both forms gaol, jail, are still written, only the latter is spoken. In U.S. jail is the official spelling."
Finally, though, "jail" as a noun is pretty infrequent compared to "prison", which are the same thing in the UK (unlike the US), but the latter is much more common. The verb form on the other hand is almost always "jail", so when you are "jailed", you're sent to a prison.
0: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/100681/which-wor...
Cambridge has it as old fashioned.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/gaol
Cambridge is British, is it not?
More significantly, Collins just says "British a variant spelling of jail".
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/gaol
I believe Collins is the standard dictionary that British people use, much like Merriam-Webster for Americans.
> I believe Collins is the standard dictionary that British people use
And you would be wrong. They've only been putting out a dictionary since 1979. OED[0] is The Dictionary in the UK, and I've quoted its take on it in an adjacent comment.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary
Well, come on, that's obviously false. Zero percent of British people own an OED or even have the resources necessary to consult one when they want to look something up. It costs over a thousand US dollars.
> Zero percent of British people own an OED
I suspect fewer than 1% of British people own any paper English-language dictionary, but the sort of people who need a dictionary beyond what dictionary.com can offer will have online access through their employer, their institution, their local UK public library, or for the princely sum of £8/m for a personal account when paying annually.
Regardless, the authority that the OED holds on British English is best understood through the criticism section of it on Wikipedia, with people decrying its absolutely overwhelming influence:
> criticizing the OED is extremely difficult because "one is dealing not just with a dictionary but with a national institution", one that "has become, like the English monarchy, virtually immune from criticism in principle"
Many libraries in the UK and Commonwealth countries have the full volume set the first, second, or both editions of the OED.
I've routinely referenced it in both the university library and the local town library since 1980.
There's been a digital version of almost all of the second edition kicking about since just prior to the print release of the second edition - I have that on most computer images I own.
The OED offers digital subscription access to the second edition and to the in progress third edition which a good number of people, libraries, companies subscribe to.
It's the dictionary of reference for those serious about the English language.
I don't disagree that practically zero percent don't own a copy, but pretty much anyone in the UK can access the OED with a free library membership. It's pretty much the only thing I use my library card for these days.
If people do use a dictionary these days they most likely do use a Collins or Oxford Dictionaries (not the same as the OED). But I imagine that most people would just use a Google search and rely on the top box which itself is using Oxford Dictionaries for its definitions.
The American Heritage Dictionary is far better than Merriam-Webster in my experience.
Shout out to Elden Ring
Never expected HN to explain to me what "evergaol" means, but here I am. Thanks :)
Relevant recent discussion:
Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th - 299 Points | 173 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43070155
Amazon ends kindle ebooks "Download and Transfer via USB" - 121 Points | 94 Comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43041726
I suspect most people that go this route (ie download and manage their own ebooks, then transfer them to their Kindle) use Calibre, which afaik, is unaffected by this change.
https://calibre-ebook.com/
This is the way ... my way at least
A year ago, I bought an ebook via Amazon. When I received it, I was so shocked by the bad quality (e.g., low-res graphics like 300px) that I returned it and bought the same book on the publisher's website. Even though it cost exactly the same, it was like a completely different book, with mixed vector and pixel graphics that made sense and even without any noticeable DRM.
That day, I decided to stop buying ebooks at Amazon. So, who cares if they shut down the download feature? You still have a week to download everything you need, and then you better buy at shops that value their customers' wishes.
What book?
The 32nd edition of "Die Seemannschaft" (ISBN 978-3-667-11742-7). Here is a link to the 33rd edition in the publisher's shop:
https://shop.delius-klasing.de/die-seemannschaft-p-2003977/
Does a jail broken Kindle allow me to remove the DRM from Kindle ebooks downloaded to it?
(I genuinely don't know. Until now, I've always downloaded Kindle purchases via ”Download and transfer via USB”, then stripped the DRM and transferred to the device with Calibre.)
Not in and of itself, no.
It would allow another source to downloading them from the Amazon website (as that is going away) on to a PC where stripping software can (in some cases) be applied.
It also might (but might not) be a way for decryption keys to be extracted from devices for that purpose, but it doesn't automatically provide such an exploit.
> It would allow another source to downloading them from the Amazon website (as that is going away) on to a PC where stripping software can (in some cases) be applied.
Right.
I wonder how hard it is, or would be, to simply emulate whatever alternative channel the Kindle devices use to download Kindle ebooks from Amazon's servers.
Until now, there hasn't been much motivation to do so, since the "download and transfer via USB" in option existed. But now there obviously will be.
Highlighting the very popular app enabled by this, KOReader: https://koreader.rocks/
https://github.com/koreader/koreader
Koreader can also be installed on Kobo out of the box with no jailbreaking. Just in case anybody was thinking of getting a Kindle for this.
It's worth doing so on older kobo readers in my experience because it turns pages faster, and it also correctly displays embedded ePub fonts that the native software doesn't. I don't know how many of you will ever read books that feature APL glyphs so I don't know how relevant that last bit is, and I can't speak for more recent models.
stock kobo has two epub readers. trash one from adobe used for drmed files and stock epubs, and an actually good one for use with KEPUB files. There's a calibre plugin to make the conversion upon push to the device.
Yes, KOReader is the reason to jailbreak a Kindle.
It's way better than the built-in Amazon reader app.
I was actually trying out KOReader (on Android via F-droid) last night and it... looks promising... but better than the Kindle app, really? It doesn't have a dark mode which is basically baseline for me reading at night. Or am I missing something?
E-ink screens usually don't want dark mode, because of the weird way they have to refresh[0]. The effect of that is much more visible with white text on black background compared to the opposite.
There's however a dark mode still if you need it; go to the gear icon, screen, auto warmth and night mode. Tap the mode line to switch it from automatic settings (either on time schedule or coordinates) to manual.
[0]: Basically, E-ink displays have to fully "reset" their screen by repeatedly toggling the pixels on and off, since they can't fully toggle themselves off normally; doing so will leave them with a bit of grey. Because this isn't very friendly on the eyes, most displays usually do this every couple "page changes" (actual pages when reading or moving in a menu.)
I've been reading at night for years on my Kindle, and dark mode works very well. During daytime you don't want to use it.
When you're using a device actually for reading, you don't care about minor defects on the page, just like you wouldn't care about some stain on the page of a paper book when reading it.
Thanks, I must have missed it, so that's the task when I go to bed tonight.
I hate the idea of my book collection being chained to Amazon by DRM, absolutely hate it. This whole DRM mess is one reason I haven't bought a dedicated e-reader.
Though, to be frank, it's not the only one, I spent a jaw dropping amount of money on a really good hardcover copy of The Lord of the Rings recently, and I feel like no ebook will ever come close to the reading experience of that thing. There is something about this immense, weighty, hardcover tome that just commands your attention and I still find that print on good paper causes less eye strain than even the e-ink screens I've used (though they are pretty good).
Is Night Mode what you are looking for?
https://koreader.rocks/user_guide/#autowarmth
I... think... it is. Thank you!
Yes, I also tried it on Android to see if it's worth jailbreaking my kindle and honestly the UI is a bit of a mess. It takes a lot of tweaks to get a nice looking layout to start with, out of the box it's just tiny text filling the screen with no margin.
Does it have machine translation? That would be a killer feature for me.
Edit: it has AskGPT!
For translation of more than a couple sentences on demand, you'd more likely translate the epub before you put it on the device, like with the Calibre plugin https://github.com/bookfere/Ebook-Translator-Calibre-Plugin . There are better solutions that have a dictionary for consistent name translations, too.
Thank you for this! My Victorian novel reading experience is about to level up.
which engine has the highest accuracy? how reliable is it?
According to WMT 2014 benchmarks, GPT 4o and Gemini Flash 1.5 are acceptable. I think Gemini Flash 1.5 8B is the most used right now due to price. In my experience, it is pretty good except in name translation and consistency across text which is why pros use translation dictionaries. It will mostly translate idioms which is nice.
Worth it just for this app.
The amount of DRM and locking down Amazon bolts onto its ereaders and ebook formats feels insane to me. I can understand the profit motive but god damn.
> The amount of DRM and locking down Amazon bolts onto its ereaders and ebook formats feels insane to me. I can understand the profit motive but god damn.
I don't. I would be much happier buying ebooks without DRM and I would buy substantially more of them if they were DRM-free.
Kobo tells you when books have DRM and when they don't (at the bottom of the store page for each book). I'd recommend supporting them over Amazon any day.
Besides that, a lot of publishers who sell their own books do so without DRM by default. As does almost every book bundle hosted by Humble Bundle.
I am with you but we are a small minority. I literally don't know anyone IRL who cares about DRM. I doubt people like us factor into their decision making at all.
No, but I know people wondering why this can't play this video in 4k or why their offline downloaded videos stopped working and they get a pop-up telling them that they need to go online to re-validate them.
Yes, not many people know what DRM is but many of the effects are noticed when it ruins their experience.
I agree, however they probably assume it's their fault or something to do with this arcane black box they use but don't quite understand how it works.
For me, I bought a single DRM book against my better judgement because it was the only available way to get it quickly at the time. Predictably, I eventually lost access to it and never bought another one since.
I have never considered DRM on my Kindle, been using one for 15 years. I can buy any book on Amazon which is any book id be trying to read on this small format, and read it immediately for usually a maximum of $10. Never had want for more!
Until, one day, Amazon recalls a book you have purchased or simply folds up the Kindle service entirely (unlikely, I know, but certainly possible).
It benefits Amazon obviously, but otherwise it's a massive shame to ebooks as a whole. I was really excited about ebooks when they started, but DRM has completely stagnated the format so much that I've almost completely given up on ebooks now, and read hard copies instead unless I really want to read something and it isn't otherwise available.
What about the format is stagnant? I haven't read a physical book in roughly a decade, and haven't remotely found ebooks lacking.
And to be clear, I understand and agree with the moral objections to DRM. I think we have lost something more than just the loss of ownership and control. But while you're actually reading an ebook, none of that ever actually affects the experience.
I would love to see some more interactive fiction (like Twine) possible. Aside that though, I think formatting to me, seems constantly poor. I think you'd have a really hard time rendering something like Hope Mirles' Paris (you might need to google it!) in ebook form well.
The main formats are plenty powerful with the formatting they support. The bigger issue is that ebooks need to render on a pretty big variety of devices, and users can override typefaces and font size. So short of using a PDF to override those choices, there's not a ton that an improved format could accomplish.
Also, ebooks do support links (I see them most commonly used for linking to chapters from the table of contents, or linking to appendix notes), so you could make interactive fiction if you wanted.
I never even got into ebooks in the first place, precisely because of the DRM and "your so-called purchases can still get yoinked" problems.
You definitely had better foresight than me then! I wrote off a lot of the "your purchases might get yoinked" talk at the time as "it would never happen in reality", but have had this happen to ebooks I've bought.
It makes more sense if you think about it as something that they need to do in order to make sure that their marketplace attracts a wide range of publishing companies, some of which have very different perspectives on digital piracy, than as a way for them to retain a small percentage of revenue that DRM could theoretically protect.
You have to pay them $20 to not get served ads on the lockscreen on your device that already costs at least $100 and probably makes healthy margin like most electronic hardware. Straight up extortion fee.
Loading F-Droid onto a modern Kindle Fire is quite simple.
You can also install FFUpdater (either via F-Droid or directly) for a huge range of browsers.
What do you see as locked down?
They're referencing the e-reader line of Kindles running a custom locked down OS (Kindle Paperwhite/Basic/Scribe/Colorsoft)
Yeah, the fact that you need an exploit just to get full access to your own property is pretty ridiculous.
I never buy ebooks from amazon because they come with drm (did once, it was annoying as hell to get it removed with downloading random python scripts and having to start a windows vm, never again). It obviously can't be to stop people copying, because all the books are available for free anyway, maybe publishers stupidly ask for it, but the most likely reason is that amazon wants you to read from their devices so they can show you ads for what you haven't bought yet.
What are some "killer" applications that would tempt the casual Kindle user to jailbreak the device?
I can see someone has ported syncthing [1], which could be convenient for syncing the contents of the device. But probably still too much work compared to using e.g. Calibre and a USB cable a few times per year.
[1] https://syncthing.net/
The smallest margin on Kindle Scribe is too large. Changing text justification is not possible. Books cannot be uploaded directly with a USB cable without additional software (calibre). Gesture configuration (tap, two-finger tap, etc). Koreader can do everything you want and is significantly better than the stock reader. Unlike other vendors, kindle requires root to install it.
I didn't know about Koreader.
A reader with native epub support is a good feature. With the stock reader, Calibre needs to do an epub -> mobi conversion (works well, but still...).
Koreader is much better than the stock software.
In what ways specifically?
Support for epubs and RSS, much more responsive UI, night mode, Calibre integration + SSH server (you can send books over Wi-Fi), countless settings to adjust pretty much anything (for example, you can set margins to zero — the minimum margins on stock firmware are insane). The list goes on.
edit: found this link. I don't think this list is complete.
https://koreader.rocks/user_guide/#whatcanyoudo
What's the best reader for KOReader? I'm in the market for a new one and would like one that handles everything a kindle does not.
I like the boox devices, (they run a mostly stock Android that you can use the Google Play store and download whatever you want to them. Switched over from my Kindle a year ago and it's been fantastic)
Proper text justification (hyphenations + no ragged edges), auto toggle between day mode (black text on white page) and night mode (white text on black page) at sunset (via your location), compact progress display, customizable taps any gestures… it takes a little it to configure but it’s worthwhile.
It's a shame this doesn't work for the Kindle Fire tablets, which are amazing devices for the price but unfortunately tethered to Amazon services.
I used a jailbroken kindle fire running lineage for years. I dropped that thing, got it wet, got it hot. It was impossible to kill. It finally had 1 drop to many but it was one of the best devices I ever had in terms of utility / $
Indeed. I had an original Kindle fire (back when it was still "Android") and I loved it great device for the money. It saddens me greatly how they've locked everything down. They could be the premier builders but instead I know then as grotesque authoritarians.
I find it exceedingly likely that they lose money on every kindle fire sold (at least during one of their regular sales), unless it causes more content sales. So the solution is of course to make it as useless as possible for anything else, otherwise they would just lose more. Same as inkjet printers.
I've had the same thought, though if true I wish they'd sell an unlocked version for more money, similar to how they did the ads on lock screen
Still have two Fire tablets (HD). Works for streaming and reading but surfing can be a drag
Wow, kindlemodding.org loads instantly. I know it's a simple website, but simple websites often still load slowly.
The entire frontpage was just 468KB, 91KB compressed, and most of that was the search index. Very neat!
Sad that 91kb is considered small.
Heh.
I, for reasons nobody will wonder too hard about, have a downloads folder here with a few hundred Kindlebooks in .azw3 format. While non of them is quite as small as 91kb, many of then are around that 468kb size.
And they're whole goddamned novels that some talented author probably spend a whole year writing, not just single "small" webpages.
The modern web is insane.
~10kb of that are for the client side search library ("lunr") and 50.7kb for that searchs index. So around 2/3 of the whole first load size are "just" for the local search feature. The remaining 30kb split up in ~7kb of additional javascript, 16kb of stylesheets, and 7kb of html (content, markup, inline styles & scripts).
I am surprised by the amount of CSS, 109kb uncompressed but minified is a lot of styles for a rather simple design, but I guess its the "just-the-docs" standard and thus somewhat verbose by being generic.
https://1kb.club/
Edit: Also, https://10kb.club/
Never heard of this.... incredible. Thanks to you and the brave makers of websites that just load.
Most websites are like 50mb, my dude.
Incorrect, most are ~2.5 MB; granted, the size has steadily increased over the years. But 50 MB sites are an exception. https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2022/page-weight
Still nearly a half million characters, though.
That's 1:40 on dialup.
Not 50MB, that's not lightweight, which this thread is about.
> Not 50MB, that's not lightweight, which this thread is about.
I'm not sure what you're meaning to say to this but my point was that 50MB is absolutely humongous and so many websites are around that order of magnitude. 91kb is a lot smaller than it could be, even though it's not exactly absolutely small.
[dead]
Still can't remove the stupid "cloud not available" nag if your kindle isn't online though, which of course it shouldn't be or they'll delete your copy of 1984.
What nag? I keep mine in airplane mode and it doesn't nag me (unless I try to do something that requires the internet)
The newer gen kindles nag you every time you go to the menu to change books, even in airplane mode. Maybe this can be turned off if you register it, but I'm tired of having to sign up to some company's ever-changing digital contract and arbitration just to read a book.
Specifically, it's a Fullscreen popover that says "cloud not available" which I of course know because it's in airplane mode! You pay 300 dollars and get treated like you're using their device instead of yours.
I updated mine a few years ago. (What was I thinking?) Now it nags me every time it is powered on.
Does anyone know if factory reset downgrades the firmware?
Root access can't fix this?
I couldn't find a way, I was hoping someone better at firmware hacking could help me out but my repeated searches have turned up little
For those who prefer the default Reddit UI: https://www.reddit.com/r/kindle/comments/1hrwytr/all_kindles...
Each say we stray further from God's light.
I could rant about how dramatically heavier the new Reddit UI is, but I'd be wasting my time - the people here should presumably know why making everything heavier isn't great
Or maybe they don't, as evidenced by this new Reddit link not being absolutely buried
As a moderator of /r/kindle, I can reveal that in January 2025, less than 1% of our visits were from users still using Old Reddit.
It does mostly attract users who aren't as technically minded as users on HN.
iOS Apps - 36.65% | Mobile Web - 24.85% | New Reddit - 24.37% | Android Apps - 13.30% | Old Reddit - 0.82%
This is much, much less than I would've guessed. I thought the new UI is universally hated.
I should leave my bubble more often.
old.reddit is the only reddit.
libreddit instances are even better (if you're just a lurker)
I just wanted to express my support for KOReader—it’s a fantastic piece of software. I use it on my Kobo, and the UI is noticeably faster than the device’s default system. It also offers a wealth of customization options. This may not be an issue on newer e-readers, but the ability to highlight seamlessly across adjacent pages is truly liberating.
On a little technical side, the cross-platform engine of KOReader is developed in Lua and low level stuff like drawing and eInk specifics is different for every device. I think this separation might be very noticable for anyone running it on Android, almost no standard UI elements, dialogs, etc. But that's what makes this project so widespread device wise I think
It’s interesting reading that the reasons for jailbreaking a kindle are so trivial, amounting to adding some minor functionality to reading books and not much else.
Kobo jailbreaks from back in the day gave you root on a stripped down Linux install, complete with telnet ssh and ftp. You could even install python and essentially do anything the cpu/display permitted. Another cool aspect with those older kobos was that they had two microsd card readers… one hidden inside the enclosure that contained the OS, accessible without even needing a screwdriver.
I think you're mistaken, the Kindle is also Linux based and you can also do anything the cpu/display permits on a jailbroken Kindle. Most people install alternative reader software that supports more formats like epub, but you can do whatever. For a while I used an old Kindle as a "monitor" (connected over ssh) for a server that was otherwise headless. Obviously you can't do anything that moves too fast, but it was nice for doing simple maintenance & system monitoring tasks.
Tailscale being available totally changed the usage of my Kobo.
Seems like a jailbroken Kindle is a requirement to get it. https://github.com/mitanshu7/tailscale_kual
What's the point of Tailscale and how did it change your usage?
No matter what network I'm on my home network is accessible to just my Tailnet without exposing any of my servers to the full Internet.
This gives me OPDS access to my Kavita library from anywhere and I basically never need to plug in my Kobo to the computer.
I guess we have so many devices nowadays, there is no point into turning an e-reader into a generic computer.
I have at least 3 RPi lying around in my home, if I want to tinker that's what I will use.
Don't Kobo jailbreaks still give you that? Are they even "jailbreaks"?
Yes, you can still do that. The only differences with modern Kobo devices are the loss of an external uSD slot and, on the latest modeks, the liss of the internal uSD slot.
I also have a hard time describing the process as jail breaking. Updates to the Kobo are simply unprotected zip files which contain firmware updates along with a gzipped tarball that contain updated files for the filesystem. Anyone with a knowledge of Linux can modify the software.
Ibalso consider the situation as rather stable. Not only has Kobo/Rakuten been ignoring modifications of the open source components for over a decade, they have been ignoring patches to the proprietary binaries.
I wish we could extract the kobo fonts so they could be used with koreader. I’ve found the fonts on the kobo root partition but they’re encrypted or otherwise obfuscated so simply copying the files doesn’t work :(
That's great! Thanks!
Hmm can a jailbroken Kindle receive library books via, say Libby/Overdrive or other method?
what are the main benefits of doing so? I'm missing what's the deal with jailbreak in this case, using thee transfer via USB? what's the best thing i can do afterwards?
I use Koreader on my Kobo ereader for a few reasons:
- Much much faster than stock interface
- More customisable
- Comes with an ssh server. I load a static rsync binary and use rsync for syncing the library
- Much better for reading manga. Supports cbz, cbr format natively. Has the ability to clip empty space around the content to make reading on a small screen easier.
Use it as an external display or control center; it's hard to find decent and affordable standalone e-ink screens.
Koreader is why I'll be doing it.
PDFs that don't suck, I hear.
Is there a site that calls out how to load this post jailbreak?
I can’t understand how kindles are popular when there’s a plethora of ebook readers without the locked down DRM.
The devices are cheap (for what they are), the ebooks are cheap and most people are already neck deep in their ecosystem so being locked down isn't an issue to them.
Also, it's not like other ebook readers let you buy non-DRM versions of whatever books you like. Most popular ebooks have DRM of some kind.
Because most users don't care. They give Amazon a few bucks a month and they get unlimited ebooks.
Amazon's ecosystem. Every major publisher is on the kindle store and it's pretty much the first place any indie author self-publishes to. Kindle Unlimited has a pretty good selection of stuff for a flat subscription and (at least in the US) you can borrow e-books from your local library through libby and access them on the kindle.
The simplicity of it makes it really appealing to users who just want to read books and not think too much about it. Android e-readers also tend to have far worse battery life and higher-friction integration with the ecosystem.
They're sold through Amazon.
I am using because of ease to use with Amazon. For my $8 book purchases I read once I do not want to see too much trouble.
Because they're affordable. Many people forego the idealism in favor of practicalism.
IIRC e-ink used to not be that cheap and Amazon sold you one for not that much money.
I bought a Kindle Scribe recently because it was around $250 secondhand. That makes it the cheapest of all of the 10" e-readers available. It's perfect if you want to read textbooks, PDFs, and manga.
Household name + most people don't even know about ebook DRM so they never encounter that downside + it's the books that come with DRM; you can move pirated books to it just fine.
It's usually up to the publisher whether their ebooks are DRMed or not, the Kobo store (eg) uses DRM also.
You can, of course, read non-DRMed eBooks on a Kindle, if you can find them.
Didn't work on my Kindle Paperwhite (10th generation) with firmware 5.17.1.0.3.
What symptoms did you experience when you tried it?
It was something like “Couldn't connect to Kindle Store”.
Did you see the "Troubleshooting" section after the jailbreak install instructions?
Thanks for your help. I've just tried it. It failed with “unexpected error” again --- I believe the first error I got was also this one. I'm not sure what I might be doing wrong.
I tried again. This time I chose “Set up later” after the factory reset, so that I don't have to waste time completing the steps after registration. I got a “Kindle Store is currently unavailable” error. This error is more likely to be the first error I got.
Edit: I finally got it working by trying one more time, without factory reset.
According to this section[1] of the website, the latest jailbreakable firmware for PW4 (10th gen) is 5.14.2.
Not sure where the title of this HN post came from, but given the jailbreak came out on Jan 1st, I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon has already patched the exploit for hardware they're still supporting.
[1] https://kindlemodding.org/firmware-and-flashing/downloading-...
New Kindle Jailbreak Works with Any Kindle on Any Firmware: 5 points | 45 days ago | 1 comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42579291
This is good news, but I am curious about the Wifi requirement - is the jailbreak web-based? Is Wifi usable afterwards on Mesquito-jailbroken Kindles?
I know on my older jailbroken Kindles, the jailbreak is very fragile and they can no longer be connected to the internet, partly because of Amazon's agressive OTAs and partly because Amazon disables developer mode and hence the jailbreak every time my Kindle 4s touch the internet.
(PS. If anyone can suggest a way to prevent this and secure my jailbreaks, it would be much appreciated - I've tried 3 different OTA blockers and none work reliably)
The install talks though how to block OTA, wifi remains fully working.
I've tried renametoabin (the one mentioned by the Mesquite jailbreak Kindle Modding Wiki in the OP), BlockKindleOTA, ShutTheBackDoor, etc. all of which do more or less the same thing to attempt blocking OTA updates on the Kindle. None work to prevent the Kindle 4 from disabling the jailbreak as soon as it gets wifi access.
I only have experience with Oasis (8th gen) I am afraid.
I could never get the rtc wake to work correctly in my kindles. For an eink dashboard, low power mode is critical. I ended up just buying a solde.red eink display. Very happy with my purchase. Did a write up about it here https://cdaringe.com/e-ink-dashboard/
Will this allow for more bluetooth options? For example connecting with bluetooth page turner would be a killer feature, but so far Kindle only allows for audio transfers via bluetooth.
Thank you so much. Kindle now looks so much better. KOreader indeed is the killer app. (little did I know that I could install it without jailbreaking). I followed the instructions. It worked flawlessly. KOreader had a few issues, installing latest nightly fixed it. and I am thoroughly enjoying the uplevelled experience.
Before I swapped to Kobo I jailbroke my Kindle Voyage and installed Koreader on it. It was amazing.
I would have kept the voyage for longer but the micro-usb was killing me. That's the only reason, the battery was still holding on, it had turning page "buttons" (better than nothing) and an amazing screen.
Question to KOReader users: can you somehow keep the Bookerly font? It's one of the main reasons I like Kindle.
Download the font[1] and put it in the '/koreader/fonts' directory[2].
1 https://font.download/font/bookerly
2. p13 https://koreader.rocks/koreader-user-guide.pdf
First, KOReader uses its own fonts in addition to whatever fonts are installed on your device, so yes. Second, you can find and download Bookerly on the internet and put it in the fonts folder, so also yes.
my kindle oasis has been largely collecting dusk since I've got my kobo. I do really miss the buttons tho, perhaps this can prolong my buying a third device.
the only thing giving me pause is that I apparently have to register the kindle, which if possible, I'm sure I've avoided. any insight on why this is necessary?
I've done the opposite. While I love the openness of the kobo and the pocket integration, I end up using my kindle oasis more because of the form factor and because with the metal enclosure it feels better in my hand.
Be careful, I accidentally sat on it and it bent, and display got ruined. Kindle original survives just fine. The metal enclosure is not very robust
After having three Kindles I moved to Kobo, and it was much, much better in the compatibility side of things.
Now I am using a PocketBook and it is also great. The synchronization feature between browser, phone and the reader is very good, it is reason enough to have it instead of a Kindle.
Amazon supporting pirating since 1997
@dang Can we link to the actual article, instead of a reddit post? https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreaking/WinterBreak/
Email hn@ycombinator.com; “@dang” doesn't do anything
Changed from https://old.reddit.com/r/kindle/comments/1hrwytr/all_kindles.... Thanks!
Cool! But what prevents Amazon from patching this in a few days?
Well they haven't patched _anything_ in the last 600 days so that would be fairly optimistic.
I am replying from my Daylight Computer. Happy to answer questions about it.
https://daylightcomputer.com
OMG that was the most unintuitive and annoying to browse/scroll page I have seen in a long time. Hope the device is good though.
Have you tried the remarkable and if so how does it compare? I don't think the remarkable 2 was anywhere near 60fps. But i think you can put nixos on it.
Looks interesting. Can you use it like a jailbroken device (ie, install whatever you want from the terminal on it)? Or is it locked down too?
As others have mentioned, it's simply Android by default.
They also officially endorse this wiki, which has information on unlocking the bootloader and gaining root access: https://www.daylighthacker.wiki
It's an Android tablet, download whatever apps you want.
It runs a custom Android 13 based skin with access to the Play Store.
It's incredible how frickin long I've waited for this. I've had WiFi off for years to avoid updating.
This is perfect!
For anyone stuck in the hotfix installation step - try turning Airplane mode on before updating your Kindle. It worked for me.
Does this jailbreak allow unrestricted web browsing? Ability to read long threads on kindle would be amazing.
Nice! With this Jailbreak can one install a Manga/Novel aggregator/reader like Mihon Manga reader?
This is great news! Can it be patched?
https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreaking/WinterBreak/ says it's based on https://kindlemodding.org/mesquito/ which in turn says it needs <=5.15.1.1
That's a mistake on my part, I've updated that page
Right now WinterBreak remains unpatched, but it is patchable and likely will be in the near-future
Is there a better way to block OTA updates than renametoabin? I've tried that and a few alternatives and none help with my Kindle 4s disabling the jailbreak whenever they get a whiff of internet.
Yes, but you can disable OTA updates
> RIP bricked Kindles during beta-testing
I wonder how many Kindles were hurt during the making of this…
Time to finally buy a Kindle I guess
Before you do that would suggest you check out Boox.
I am very surprised to scroll this thread and see Kobo call outs but not Boox.
No need to jailbreak as highly customizable.
Do you have any thoughts on the Supernote?
Is it worth buying a Kindle now?
No, Kobos are a better choice. Much more consumer-friendly, even if the default book store is still DRM-encumbered.
Can you buy a "Kindle with ads" and remove these ads then after a Jailbreak?
Yes, it is technically possible, but it is occult knowledge. I don't know how. I know the one Kindle with ads I had, they somehow disappeared and never returned after I reset it, possibly because I did not connect it to any Amazon account or Wifi. You won't get any help with that aspect from any mainstream Kindle jailbreak devs or on MobileRead, as they follow a general policy of live and let live with Amazon. They don't get DMCAs on jailbreaks, they don't help people "pirate".
You can usually just contact amazon support and they will remove the ads for you without a fee.
They don't do that anymore, at least not for me. I tried contacting two different support agents and both mentioned that the functionality has been removed for them by the higher-ups.
Yes you can
The constant anti patterns in how your library and even things in Amazon's interest like book reviews display are why I would do this, if I thought I could script or fix the changes away. Kindle is Doctorow's enshittification at scale.
I have a nice unregistered recent Kindle that I put books on via USB (I don't even give it WiFi access), and every single time I switch back to the main library to pick a new book to read it puts up a modal informing me that it doesn't have cloud access and prompts me to register. Quite annoying.
This and a hundred other snippets of mal behaviour. I have both calibre side loaded and on device, and it does not like the mixture one bit: they're just files. What's the beef?
Not just enshittification in the way of spying and ads. The actual reading experience has got worse.
I have a Kindle 11 and an old Kindle 3. The Kindle 3 actually works better - easier to read, no random pauses, easier to search.
To this day, the 3 is still my ideal version. Everything else since has fallen flat in some way in comparison. It was the right size, had paddle buttons for turning the page, had a passable keyboard, was responsive, could play audio, &c. It was excellent. I very much wish mine didn't die on me.
How do I get Apple Books on there?
You don’t. It’s impossible with Apple’s DRM.
what can you do with jailbreak Kindle? My Kindle usage has been pretty basic.
it would be really cool to try bionic reader on the ne jailbreak.
My Kindle was bricked by an Amazon OTA update. Checkmate, atheists.
what can I do with it specifically?
i use a boox these days,but i do have 4 kindles collecting dust
Hell yeah, power to the users.
imagine if they pulled a slick double free in the bootloader heap and jacked up a custom rop chain to completely sidestep that rsa sig check. amazon ain’t gonna be happy.
Kobo are giving you root access with telnet from the start. You can flash modded firmwares, change the backend servers to phone your own calibre-web instance, install ssh, koreader and even a tailscale vpn on it. They even have UART pins labelled on their board. These are amazing devices to play with. And they read pretty much everything you throw on their storage: epub, cbz, cbr, pdf..
I moved to Kobo because I bought my partner the Kindle Oasis and just after a year the battery couldn't hold a charge. I contacted Amazon and they would only give me 10% off a new device. I only found one person on the internet who was courageous enough to open one up. The screen was epoxied to the body with no way of opening the device without destroying the screen.
So I got her a Kobo Libra H2O. Just as waterproof, significantly cheaper, and you can actually repair it. I ended up getting a Libra Colour for myself and love it.
This shows the decline in Amazon's customer service. I had several Kindles starting with Kindle Keyboard. At that time, Amazon's service was beyond amazing.
At one point, I had some issue with one of the Kindle while it was past 1 year. Amazon sent overnighted new Kindle for free when I was just hoping they give me some troubleshooting steps.
I stopped using Kindle about 4-5 years ago mostly because of all the bad press especially around them removing purchased books. Now I mostly buy paper books. I also use BOOX e-ink tablet to borrow books from library or newspapers. (BOOX is not ideal but there is no other choice of e-ink tablets that can let you use 3rd party apps, sadly.)
I'm on the BOOX train as well. I wanted a device that I could read books and catch up on HN on. Kindles do great with the former (if you're bought into their ecosystem) but suck badly for the latter. (Silk Browser is still too slow and renders all pages server-side with no ability to change this.) My BOOX Page 7 does everything I want and more, though I did choose to root and debloat it as well as install a firewall given the company's (ONYX) shady backgrounds.
my biggest fear from moving out of kindle is losing access to the store. they did a good job securing most of the authors and books.
what’s your source for books and how often it happens for the books you’re looking for to be unavailable?
Libgen, #bookz on irc, and dedrm plugin for calibre will let you get drm free copies of books you already own so you can use them however you see fit
Sadly Libgen seems to have been down for the past couple of months, there is some discussion whether it will ever come back or not.
I heard some new guys were running it federal bureau of something
Depends where you look :)
It's mostly gone now. Even on the newer domains.
https://open-slum.org/
This is why I buy an android e-ink tablet.
My needs are unique, all of our needs are unique I suppose, but I want epub but also want to use the Kindle app (in cases of them being the only place to get a book).
I worry about firmware updates(security), but also my needs do not require the tablet being online constantly. So in a case like this, not a phone, not online, I only bring the wifi up to download books from Amazon via their Android app.
Otherwise, I copy epubs over via USB.
This is the middle ground.
I've been quite happy with the Meebook E-Reader M7.
FWIW actual kindles don’t need to be online except if you are buying a book or transferring one via their website.
Older Kindles did have an optional cellular connection, but that was to make purchases easier.
Kindles aren’t limited to the Amazon store. Your kindle has an email address you can email books to, and there are ways to transfer via USB, etc.
thanks, i researched into this and bought a boox go color 7. now i can have both the kindle app (for books i can't buy anywhere else or already purchased) and new books outside of kindle app. bonus, it has text to speech which kindle doesn't really want to let you do so it won't lower audible purchases. not the same quality as audoble, of course, but free.
google search "book_name epub"
This is rather terrible for supporting authors though. I read a lot of scifi from small authors who self publish on kindle direct publishing, and I would rather they get my money for their work.
And yes I can pay then find the epub (and not all are available, due to small author), but the experience is then much worse.
Contact the author, send direct to paypal. this way you get freedom, they get more money
> rather terrible for supporting authors ... scifi from small authors who self > publish on kindle ... I would rather they get my money for their work.
I would suggest you write them (each of them) a letter, or email, which:
1. Discourage them from publishing on an Amazon platform, explaining how Amazon, and DRM-laden reading, is terrible.
2. Suggest that they publish with a link allowing readers to pay them directly, or at least via a payment platform (see here for example: https://www.mightynetworks.com/resources/patreon-alternative... )
While this is right in theory, in practice I don't think you realize why those authors are there : discovery and ease of management. Your offer makes them lose both, for what gain from their POV ?
But Amazon DRM-laden reading isn’t terrible. I buy a book, it’s on my Kindle. With Kindle Unlimited, I can read tons of books for a fairly small monthly price.
Not sure what problem we’re trying to solve.
So, I had a kindle, amazon prime, everything.. until the pandemic, and here in Norway we don't have an amazon webshop of our own. Up until this point I had been buying from Amazon US. The pandemic made shipping from the US hard, and so I decided to use AmazonUK, my login worked there, so i just switched to using that one. Then shipping from the UK became hard (brexit), so I started using AmazonDE.
Then Amazon locked my account, and said I needed to prove who I am. So I did, sent in documents to prove who I was. Didn't matter, apparently I had broken some rule about using my login in different amazon stores or something. Apparently I wasn't allowed to do that.
So now I lost all my books I had bought, because Amazon decided to ban me.
If I had bought these books from any open store, I would still have my books.. but because I bought from Amazon, I've lost them all.
That's why DRM free books are important.
The problem of supporting authors who actually want to be paid more than beer money (or any money, really) for their work, for one.
There's also the problem of moving those books onto another platform once Amazon directly affects you and you wish to move onto something else. (Amazon Unlimited DRM hasn't been broken yet.)
This is partially on the author, and I say this as somebody how writes as a hobby. It's not too difficult to publish on the Kobo store, and there are other stores out there. Of course, it's difficult to compete with Amazon when it comes to reach and to some small features, but they are no panacea either. For example, they don't support epub 3 with aural synchronized media, and they do something terrible to images embedded into ebooks that make them frankly useless. And they charge authors an outrageous amount for kilobyte of ebook content.
I believe Amazon impose a whole bunch of conditions on people publishing on their platform. Along the lines of exclusivity and controlling where else if at all you can sell it. I'm pretty sure Corey Doctorow extensively covered this.
Yes they do. One particularly annoying one is about pricing: price can't be zero. If you write as a hobby and don't care about making a dollar, then Amazon gets in the way. Sure, you can publish in Amazon and charge 1 USD, but then you can't publish your book on your own website for free because it goes against Amazon's TOS.
There are other peeves. Covers for example: it's against the TOS to have a cover that shows female nipples, but it's okay to show male nipples. Beyond the sexism of the rule, I'm worried that the way to enforce this is to have some ML system checking all the covers and making judgements about nipples. Which means you have to ask your cover artist to not draw anything that may accidentally look like the wrong kind of nipple \o/ .
> they charge authors an outrageous amount for kilobyte of ebook content
Probably because of the kindles with 'free data' to download books.
FWIW, Amazon generally doesn’t require DRM on ebooks.
> This is rather terrible for supporting authors though.
Supporting a terrible platform to become the main place to get books is way, way worse.
`filetype:epub book_name` should be tried first, in my opinion.
... but this does not replicate the kindle one-stop store experience. and looking on the kobo store doesn't help either, i wanted the experience for someone who actually migrated from kindle. i may find the books i'm looking for now, but what are the struggles for people who actually used it? do they come later than kindle, are they using multiple shops, etc.
edit; yes, i know about the pirating options. i'm not talking about those.
Kobo in my experience has all the books from big publishers, the publishers that publish paper books too. What they do not have is the stuff from Kindle Direct Publishing. This is stuff people have self-published on Kindle, I think Amazon requires exclusivity when you do that too?
In my opinion this is actually more of a blessing than a curse since I consider 99% of that garbage I don't want to sift through.
Sometimes multiple store headaches are still a necessity depending on region. Even on Amazon.
IIRC they give you a better revenue split or something of that nature if you only publish there
same
[dead]
If there's no DRM-free version available to purchase, I buy from the kobo store (it's very easy to access different region stores which can impact book availability) and I then remove the DRM. Library genesis is also an option, of course.
You can browse the Kobo book store here https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebooks
What are the prices compared to Amazon's? Books are generally cheaper here in the subcontinent. I did a price comparison of 30 books and found out that Kindle editions cost significantly lesser than Kobo. And Kobo editions cost slightly higher than paperbacks.
The total amount for these 30 randomly selected books came to: Paperback price: ₹13,017 (~$149) Kobo price: ₹13,252 (~$152) Kindle price: ₹9,171 (~$105)
I found that it's often best to use google search to search the kobo store. Books sometimes have multiple editions with significant price differences. Not sure if it would make a difference in this case.
What other popular stores exist? And I assume you sideload those books to Kobo afterwards? In that case, is the experience of reading sideloaded books inferior to that of reading store bought books?
I don't know if it still works, but the last time I checked it was possible to un-DRM (de-DRM?), and convert amazon format to normal epub, and read it everywhere
Depends on which version of the DRM. KFX hasn’t been broken yet. It’s been a bit of a cat-and-mouse game where the DeDRM people make some progress then Amazon tweaks something and they have to start over. There are some workarounds that involve getting Amazon to give you an older version of the file, but then you lose the typography improvements present in later versions of Amazon’s ebook format.
Yeah there's a way to do this with Calibre + some plugins on windows. I tried on my Mac but it was unsuccessful.
I use the libby app on Kobo to get books from the library. Its just what I need. I can add epubs and pdfs from dropbox but never use that any more.
annas-archive.org
ebooks.com has loads of books on the platform, though they're DRMed. libby's great also.
no need to be locked into kindle anymore.
transferring books is also easy. you can install Calibre on your computer, connect the Kindle to it via USB and transfer. if you're into self-hosted, you can run Calibre on a server, either as an installed binary or in a container, and send books to it via email or dropbox.
Search for alternative first. If it doesn't exist: purchase and download the file from amazon and remove the DRM.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43070155 - Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th (2025-02-16)
See title of OP ;)
This thread is about Kindle alternatives. If you don't have a Kindle at all, there's nothing to jailbreak.
anna archives
I got a Kindle (moving on from an absolutely ancient rooted Nook) purely because the Oasis looked so nice
I'll never get a Kindle again because I was blown away by how impossible it was to repair (plus the closed system really sucks). Mine broke for no reason at all a bit ago; my best guess is the battery started to swell inside it and that broke the screen. Got a Forma super cheap ($25!) and I've been super happy with it, feels a bit cheaper but it's actually got some level of grip. Have read more on it in a month than I did on my Kindle in the last 3 years.
Haven't even dabbled into the custom tools stuff much but it all sounds great. Might get a cheap secondary one to play with, can become an (outdated) offline Wikipedia reader if nothing else.
Where did you find a Kobo Forma so cheap? A quick check on Ebay lists the cheapest at 150€, but maybe I'm looking at the wrong model.
Just got really lucky. Someone hadn't a clue what they were selling, was listed as "Kobo e reader" or something very vague like that. Fully expected it to either be broken or not match the image.
In general the Forma looks overpriced imo, the benefits of the 8 inch screen don't really warrant a price that nears the Libra Color or Sage.
Shocking that battery didn't work after a year. I still use my Kindle 3 from 2010; it still holds weeks of standby charge, days worth of reading.
Don’t they have a 12 month warranty? What do you want Amazon to do after more than 12 months? 10% discount is above and beyond their obligations.
Have human wellbeing as the priority in making products.
Treat users with respect.
Make hardware open, firmware open, repairable.
Let’s be honest here, there are user hostile products and pro-user products. Let’s make making user hostile products illegal / unprofitable with laws.
For the record, my Kindle died after 4 years and Amazon replaced it. That one died after 2 and they replaced it again - all free. Australian Consumer Law is required to be followed if they want to trade here. If you want respect, speak to your lawmakers.
I thought 4 years is not bad at all but it’s even better because „consumer guarantee rights under the Australian Consumer Law, … don’t have a specific expiry date“ and „apply for a period of time that is considered reasonable having regard to the nature of the products or services“[0].
0. https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/broken-but-out-of-warr...
ACL is fantastic, gotten my 2017 MacBook Pro 15" fixed multiple times for free even out of applecare, last time it was fixed, it was 6 years old. Had issues with the keyboard, and the screen. Seems to be a common issue with this model.
https://gregsamborski.com/macbook-pro-led-screen-discolorati...
It's completely reasonable to expect it to last longer than 12 months, especially considering this is their premium model.
In Europe, consumers should be getting longer protection than 1 year. May require a fight / small claims court submission to exercise one's rights.
Here in Mew Zealand we have the consumer guarantees act. Stuff needs to last for a duration commensurate with its price. Nice and vague and super good for the consumer.
An iPhone can generally get fixed under warranty for 2-3 years. I’ve never tried a Kindle but the premium model should get 2 years without too much fuss.
Consumer protections in the UK and EU means they have to last a reasonable length of time, and if not you get a proportional refund (or repair, or replace). I've had refunds from devices several years old.
Amazon is [d]evolving the concept of "owning" what you paid for - slowly, but surely [1]
[1] https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/amazon-removing-download...
Yes, every device should fail immediately upon warranty expiration.
You should build a company founded on that principle.
Call it GTL Pty Ltd
Formerly known as Guaranteed To Last, but they dropped that naming and are now know simple as GTL after a social media smear campaign where people were saying ‘guaranteed to be the last thing you ever buy from that company’.
Oh, come on, they could totally own that smear campaign. "Guaranteed to be the last [class of device] you ever buy, unless you give it away." Something something heirlooms, put together a simple, 30-second narrative for the advertisement campaign, job done.
12 months is a laughable amount of time. Sadly, companies have normalized such short periods of time, so much so that everybody would give me looks when I say that 5 or 10 years would be more appropriate. Especially tech folks, so I'm expecting pushback in a forum like HN.
My in-laws have a few kitchen appliances from the 80s. Still working rock-solid. Not the wifi-enabled modern crap with some shitty cloud-based app that you need to replace all the time.
In Europe the minimum is 2 years, but I agree it's still too short.
That's kinda my point. Two years are better than one, but celebrating it as the achievement is really missing the bigger picture (and is a great success of lobbying work)
Would be normal/natural if we could change the batteries and not throw away devices when the battery fails even more natural when the device is not dirt cheep.
This! I've worked on https://github.com/bjesus/air as a completely alternative and open source UI for my Kobo Clara HD. PostmarketOS support on the device is great and very recently an important patch that will allow us to use Wayland was also merged: https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/merg...
This looks great. Is there by out-of-the-box usable e-reader that supports SSH? Air still has some manual steps/maintenance.
For comparison, I've used PostmarketOS on Pinephone, and it required a lot of fiddly to get a poor experience.
But maybe the simpler usecase of "just reading" has good solutions?
Looks like I could use https://github.com/PNDeb/pinenote-debian-image on my PineNote.
Remarkable Pro looks great and runs Linux and has SSH out of the box.
Boox devices are Android based, so also pretty hackable.
I moved from Kindle to Kobo for the sole reason that the backlight had tunable color temperature. I've ended up liking it for lot of reasons, including how open they are.
Kindle Paperwhite (and possibly others) have adjustable colour temperature too, with time-based automation. From a quick squizz, not quite the same as the Kobo (I don't think it has the "more blue in daytime" function) but just noting that it does exist on some in some fashion.
It's great that Paperwhite have caught up to Kobo in this manner. Back when I was evaluating replacing my (lost) Kindle I believe it was only an option on the top tier ($300+) Kindle.
I love Kobo for that. I hooked UART with a Variometer (measure rate of climb in aircraft) and use it in glider soaring as a flight computer (good contrast on sunny day)
Posted the details here: https://zabirauf.dev/blog/aviation/glider_flight_computer
Thank you! You just sold a kobo :-)
I have a remarkable 2 and really like it, but my wife needs a new "Kindle" and I'd rather cut my finger off than pay Amazon to abuse me. Looking forward to trying out the kobo
Is remarkable 2 a good ebook reader?
The actual experience of reading is quite good, but, it is not really fully-featured for EPUBs.I was trying to reflow text into a different font and size yesterday and it took forever. I ended up giving up. It is, however, quite hackable, and `rmapi` on GitHub allows you fine control of its (linux) system.
Nope, though possibly with a custom workflow, it might be.
I own a Kindle Scribe, Paperwhite (a couple versions) and reMarkable 2, and while I promise myself to set up an easier experience for using reMarkable for reading and then selling the Scribe, I didn't find the time so they "got me".
It has no backlight, which I would find annoying, but i know someone who has read tens of thousands of pages on the remarkable 2. It's easy enough to copy epubs and pdfs to it though, and the screen is big which helps.
Personally, I find it to be an excellent ebook reader. Easy to navigate, and works well with epubs and PDFs. I like to highlight and annotate on books as I read, and to me that is an absolutely killer feature that the remarkable allows me to do. It also saves a separate copy with the annotations so you aren't marking up your original, which is something I really love.
Devices made specifically to be e-readers are usually a bit less friction. but to me, The openness and hackability of the remarkable and it's excellent feature set for writing makes it an excellent choice.
I have a reMarkable 2. It's better as a book annotator than a book reader, IMO. It's fine for my use case (reading during rest periods while at the gym), but I wouldn't use it as a full-time reader, as it can get quite slow and doesn't have very many eReader features.
Fwiw, several stories here on HN about remarkable, so a search is probably worth doing if you've not read those other stories yet.
The Kobo Libra Colour has the best UX of a device I own, in that it's completely invisible. I can just read my damn books, highlight passages I think are noteworthy and save words I like the sound of. Everything just works, and the high seas experience is seamless.
I’ve recently looked into buying a replacement Kindle. In the end the Kindle hardware looks and feels much more premium with the display being even with the frame.
I hope there’s new models coming from Kobo that address that soon.
I recently had a very bad experience with Kobo.com. Bought an ebook thinking I could simply download and view it on computer. haha was I naive... I could not download it from the website, instead the download gave me some XML file for some Adobe shit app, which would then download it. But I did not sign up to download and install Adobe shit on my machine. So another option is using the Kobo app. But guess what... they don't have it for GNU/Linux. And I thought maybe I can use it with WINE, but their friggin download link for the app did not even work in Firefox, even when allowing all the third party crap they put on that page to load. So that way was also blocked. OK, I thought, let's get it refunded then. But good luck!!! finding any kind of support e-mail address! All their docs and links brought me back to their chat bot, which did not help me and instead always directed me to the docs again.
Worse, they have the audacity to state on their pages that only some ebooks are eligible for a refund and to find out whether yours is, they send you back into the docs and chat bot loop. I guess they don't want people to refund, so they made finding any contact info especially difficult.
How to make a real shitty user experience 101, presented to you by kobo.com. With this it is clear to me, that I will never again buy any ebooks from them. For anyone, who does not own their Kobo device already, I say hands off this one! Maybe buy the book and download a DRM free ebook from ... elsewhere. That way you pay, can have a clean conscience and enjoy your ebook.
DRM free ebooks are very few and far between, especially current titles.
What you describe is a pain and all true, this is just the state of ebooks unfortunately.
Kobo is not great at offering refunds like Amazon, as expected in many ways being a much more lean business not being propped up by AWS margins.
Kobos are just a simpler mental model for non IT experts as well, you plug them in, they behave like a USB key, you can't get easier than that.
Behaving like a USB key is not a simpler mental model than "buy books on Amazon and they're on your device".
I agree on the freedom for geeks, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking non IT experts want to deal with files.
Kobo has the same thing. Buy books on Kobo and they are on your device. But they also support ePub natively and ADE DRM natively so there's more options of where to source books before conversion.
Kindles have literally always behaved like that, from the beginning.
The very newest generation of Kindle changed the storage protocol from traditional mass storage (which was compatible with everything) to MTP, which is mildly annoying for Mac users, but it is still intended to just show up as a flash drive.
That is exactly how Kindle first generation used to work, and thankfully mine still does its job.
I love my Kobo reader and am happy with switching to it after a decade or more of daily Kindle use. But I think it is important to not over-sell it. It has had certain unexpected frailties, such as corrupting the database when I neglected to eject the USB device before pulling the cable, something that resulted in losing my notes and current progress. I also had to learn about the Kobo ePub format and install a Calibre plugin to get that working, otherwise some ePub files would rapidly drain the Kobo battery. I did not expect bad html/css to significantly affect battery life. I'm not sure I would recommend it to an older person or someone who doesn't have a little patience for tinkering.
I'm still daily using my kobo touch from 2011, my oldest piece of 'still in use tech' (other than the Wii, which the kids still bowl on!).
Not being bound to an ecosystem, has really been a blessing - and in part kept it in use.
I had no idea the extent that Kobos allow you to do these sort of things. Heavily considering a Kobo as my next e-reader once my PW3 gives ups. Is there a good starting resource for Kobo modifications like you mentioned?
Mobile read forum for most of it, but also heavily recommend kobopatch
1. https://github.com/pgaskin/kobopatch-patches/releases optional but nice to tweak some small ui details and get rid of ads
2. https://github.com/videah/kobo-tailscale to have a secure connection with your calibre-web instance, but you could also use self-signed certs
3. https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/wiki/Kobo-Integratio... adding books to calibre-web will cause them to appear on the device the next time it syncs with calibre-web
We also have the amazing Plato reader, like koreader but with a snapper UI and made exclusively for kobo and written in Rust by the guy responsible for bspwm.
https://github.com/baskerville/plato
There are ads in kobo? Is it normal or some sort of cheaper offering like kindles?
No ads per se, but a recommendation tile and a kobo plus subscription tile on the main screen that just eats display space for nothing. I mainly use kobopatch to change the epub reader margins, get the page remaining in a chapter and block firmware updates and a few other details. Totally optional, it's just pure nitpicking here. Here is all my kobo modding work in this repo, you can also find what firmware mods are available...
https://github.com/obynio/kobopatch-config/tree/master/src
Thanks, I'm liking kobo more and more every time I read about it :).
Out of curiosity, why block updates? Does it conflict with your modification
Thank you! Will peruse over these
They're also intentionally repairable! I've got a Kobo Libra Colour which is a newer model, and its product page links to ifixit. I love it so much.
Newer devices apparently use secure boot and prevent modding the firmware, causing the developers of the Inkbox/Quill alternative distro to abandon the entire project: https://github.com/Quill-OS/quill
What you can't do on Kobo is use the page up and down buttons to scroll in the web browser unless you go through the effort of installing the cross-compiling toolchain and building a display server and a browser.
I bought a pretty early Kobo like 10+ years ago and found myself very underwhelmed with the software situation. I sold it and went back to my kindle.
Maybe it's time to take a second look. The hacker in me's interest is piqued.
Frankly though, the biggest thing that keep me on Kindle these days I suspect are hard to replicate. For example, automatic audio book/kindle sync where I can switch back and forth, listening to the audio book in my car and reading at home in bed. For two, read.amazon.com where I can read from my locked down work machine without installing anything. The whole whispersync ecosystem.
I don’t use any Amazon hardware but Kindle Unlimited has got me like netflix did back in the day.
Trashy sci fi is my vice.
Not to mention you're not blowing money up Bezo's botoxed arse.
I moved away from Kobo because of the ancient USB port, and got my PocketBook with USB-C four years ago, and I am still using the PocketBook.
With USB-C, Kobo would be a very good product. I guess they use it now.
They do. It's great.
There are also the onyx boox models, many run android, and it seems like you can install whatever you want. I have no experience with them myself, but I am curios.
I have a Onyx Boox Go Color 7, and I love it.
Wow, this is so unbelievable, that I decided to sell my Kindle Oasis and get a Kobo. Thank you for this comment. I hate the restrictions on my Kindle.
Do you know how much of this applies to older Kobos? I love my Forma but I'd rather start experimenting like crazy on a 2011 one first if I can.
True. To play the Devil's Advocate, Kindle is exceptionally cheap (especially the older models) on Prime Days
I really like my old Kobo, but I was a tad disappointed when I had to swap the screen. It's a very shoddy build. The screen is glued to the board and the battery is soldered. I felt like it was made to break when you try to open it.
I switched from Kindle to Kobo and out of the box it would hard-crash within a few minutes of using it, every single time. You have to pry the case off and remove the internal battery hard reboot it. I sent it in, waited 2 months for a replacement, and the new one (with new firmware) does the exact same thing.
I despise Amazon as a brand but nothing comes close to the kindle hardware wise. Waterproof, indestructible, and never had it crash.