this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2026
195 points (99.5% liked)
Not The Onion
21216 readers
844 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, ableist, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I understand not being able to support newer eBook formats or certain content on older devices; standards change, as do the capabilities of devices (resolution, storage, etc.) and that makes sense. But unless I'm missing something major, there shouldn't be any issue with them allowing users to keep accessing their account and purchase already-compatible eBooks for these older devices. Basically bricking it if you de-register or factory reset is absurd.
Amazon eBook formats have DRM that encrypts it to you and your Kindle's unique device ID and they can just stop reissuing, or revoke the decryption keys. They make it extraordinarily difficult to export/download them in a DRM-free format that would otherwise be unaffected.
They can deny access, sure, but they should allow access to something you've already paid for (both the Kindle and the ebook).
Or at the very least pay it back.
I suspect they're ending support for some older format these devices need on their server-system, since it's been a few years.
But sadly no technical details given.
That would likely be .mobi, which had been deprecated for years. In fact, when I had an Oasis years ago, and I emailed it books I had downloaded, it would refuse them unless they were .epub format.
(Yes, you read that right. Each Kindle has an email address where you can mail your books bought elsewhere.)
I imagine that after several years post .mobi, they are finally done providing that format for older kindles that don't support .epub. It sucks for the people who use the old Kindles, but all e-readers these days, Amazon made or otherwise, prefer .epub as well, so it makes sense that they wouldn't continue to support an old format indefinitely.