for those who have Kindle at home and don't want to use Amazon's Infrastructure I prepared this blog post which describes how to jailbreak your Kindle and install open-source software on it :)

After you are done you will:

have KOReader installed
be able to load epub books into the Kindle via email
create epub books from browser tabs

Post here: Kindle Jailbreak

I believe that if you already have Kindle laying around it could be beneficial to use it without Amazon software instead of buying Kobo/another alternatives. Or course - don't buy a brand new Kindle just to do the jailbreak, you can invest your money to a different company

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[–] excral@feddit.org 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

If you have a Kindle that is recent enough to still get updates, chances are it can't be jailbroken right now and you should prevent it from automatically updating if you ever want to have a chance at jailbreaking it. There are no known exploits to jailbreak the most recent Kindle firmwares (>= 5.18.6) and if one is discovered, Amazon will likely release a firmware that patches it shortly afterwards.

In order to prevent updates, first connect your Kindle to a PC and delete already existing update files, if there are any (named update-???.bin or similar). Then you have essentially two options:

keep your Kindle permanently disconnected from the internet
fill your Kindle's storage with (junk-)files until there's not enough storage left for update files

See here for more info on preventing updates.

After your Kindle is successfully jailbroken, you can delete the junk-files and reconnect it to the internet without any issues.

[–] erebion@news.erebion.eu 1 points 6 days ago

Also, battery will last much longer. Nowadays I have a tolino, but back when I had a Kindle, I kept it offline. I had no need for internet access. I just added books via Calibre and USB cable every now and then.

I think newer Kindle firmware requires setting up with an Amazon account at least once before it can be used offline, though.

[–] FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

My Kindle Oasis is still on 5.15.2 despite being connected to the internet. I wonder why that is.

Anyway, thanks for the specifics. I should look into this. I don’t like the jailbroken software as much, but I’m conscious of what Amazon might do to my Kindle next.

Obligatory: I bought my Kindle before I was aware of more ethical alternatives. I won’t be buying Amazon again.

[–] PonyOfWar@pawb.social 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Jailbroke my Kindle Oasis about a year ago. Pretty happy with KOReader. The UI is janky TBH, but once you know where everything is and get used to it, it's also quite powerful.

[–] mtoboggan@feddit.org 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Maybe give this a try.

[–] PonyOfWar@pawb.social 1 points 1 week ago

Looks nice, I will!

[–] Poolitzer@feddit.org 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thats interesting I immideatly fell in love with it and the UI.

[–] PonyOfWar@pawb.social 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

For me, getting to know and like it took some time and I've unfortunately seen some people bounce off it immediately after using it for a few minutes. There are definitely some really nice aspects to it - like the reading statistics and the shortcuts along the screen edge. But in terms of UI/UX-Design, I'd personally consider it far from ideal. Like how when you press the bottom part of the screen, the bottom menu comes up - which makes sense - but when you press the top part of the screen, the top menu and the bottom menu come up simultaneously on top of each other and you have to close each of them separately. Or how there are like four separate options menus, located in different submenus. The home screen is a file explorer rather than a simple library of ebooks as you'd find it on most e-readers. It's all very "designed by programmers". It doesn't follow established design best-practices and wouldn't be intuitive to the average e-reader user.