Amazon has told owners it will soon stop supporting older Kindle models - a move which has left some users outraged.
In emails from the tech giant, affected users were thanked for being a “longtime Kindle customer” but told devices released during or before 2012 would no longer receive updates from 20 May.
The move will mean owners of older Kindles, including its earliest models such as the Kindle Touch and some Kindle Fire tablets, will be unable to download new e-books.
Amazon said it has supported affected models for years and their active users have been offered discounts to help “transition to newer devices”, but some have criticised it for making up to two million devices “obsolete”.
“I have a Kindle Touch that I’ve had since 2013, it works great, I bought a book on it a few months ago, and suddenly it’s obsolete,” one X user wrote in a post tagging Amazon.
What do you use for self-hosting?
I primarily use Kavita to host my personal library because of its UI customization. It’s great for comics and magazines, too. There’s also lazylibrarian and mylar3 for procurement.
Calibre is the main program for doing most things with ebooks. It’s plug-in support allows for things like deDRM that you can use for stripping DRM. There are a lot of tutorials out there for it.
There could very well be better alternatives I’m unaware of, but Caliber has worked pretty well for me. If you’re using a Kobo, though, I don’t think you even need it; it natively supports epub, so you can just connect it to your computer and drag and drop