It no longer does for the first few generations of Kindles. My Kindle Keyboard (16 years old, but it still works and I still use it almost daily) is essentially a useless paperweight now, as far as Amazon is concerned. De-registering it will brick it and they shut down the "send file to e-mail" service, too. Can no longer buy and download books off Amazon either (they shut that down in 2024, afaik).
If not for Calibre, I would have absolutely no option of ever getting new books on it.
So it still works as a generic ereader via Calibre? That seems like a pretty fine outcome. I don't think Amazon (or any company) should be on the hook supporting a device for 16 years. I can't think of any company which does. Dropping support for old devices frees up eng resources. If you've ever worked in a shop needing to support legacy devices, it becomes a huge burden to keep up support (especially as the supporting software/hardware starts to degrade, like 3P updates) for what becomes an increasingly small number of users. Of course, if the number of users remains significant, support should be maintained.
I've decided with all my commercial e-readers that the USB+calibre is my only option as I do not wish to share my reading habits with the zillionaire overlord.
There might be new and fancy UI or something, but I spend 99% of the time only flipping pages so the outdated UX is nothing compared to the privacy I get.
Ancient Basic Kindle works still nicely and so does 1st gen Paperwhite + the few Kobo's we have in the family.
But what you won’t get is locked down with DRM — the Open Book Touch uses standard EPUB and TXT files loaded from a micro SD card, and thanks to the WiFi-enabled ESP32 at its heart, it offers up a web interface that lets you manage your collection over the network.
Kobo works great in my experience though for those looking for a turnkey open-ish commercial solution.
I read on the original Openbook lite, which despite only accepting .txt files, is still a great little device. I'm excited to get the touch and not have to pre-format massive files in a text editor.
Comments
Curious about what has changed? I've only ever used the email method and that continues to work.
It no longer does for the first few generations of Kindles. My Kindle Keyboard (16 years old, but it still works and I still use it almost daily) is essentially a useless paperweight now, as far as Amazon is concerned. De-registering it will brick it and they shut down the "send file to e-mail" service, too. Can no longer buy and download books off Amazon either (they shut that down in 2024, afaik).
If not for Calibre, I would have absolutely no option of ever getting new books on it.
So it still works as a generic ereader via Calibre? That seems like a pretty fine outcome. I don't think Amazon (or any company) should be on the hook supporting a device for 16 years. I can't think of any company which does. Dropping support for old devices frees up eng resources. If you've ever worked in a shop needing to support legacy devices, it becomes a huge burden to keep up support (especially as the supporting software/hardware starts to degrade, like 3P updates) for what becomes an increasingly small number of users. Of course, if the number of users remains significant, support should be maintained.
I've decided with all my commercial e-readers that the USB+calibre is my only option as I do not wish to share my reading habits with the zillionaire overlord.
There might be new and fancy UI or something, but I spend 99% of the time only flipping pages so the outdated UX is nothing compared to the privacy I get.
Ancient Basic Kindle works still nicely and so does 1st gen Paperwhite + the few Kobo's we have in the family.
Same here re email. Though I’m considering switching to kobo anyways cuz Bezos sucks.
I have been hoping for an open e-reader to be built, and it appears someone is building one: https://hackaday.com/2026/07/14/open-book-touch-makes-crowd-... (Joey Castillo’s Open Book project, no affiliation, I just like open/sovereign tech stacks)
Kobo works great in my experience though for those looking for a turnkey open-ish commercial solution.
I read on the original Openbook lite, which despite only accepting .txt files, is still a great little device. I'm excited to get the touch and not have to pre-format massive files in a text editor.