Amazon Kindle 4

Are you truly locked in? I still have a kindle 4 from 2011 that works fine. If you have a lot of Amazon only ebooks, there’s nothing stopping you from keeping an old device for those. I switched to a Kobo and have zero regrets. It has overdrive/libby support and I can check out books from my library directly to it. The Kobo store is fine as well and I can maintain a calibre library for everything else

I have a kindle 4 from 2011, still runs like a champ and holds multiple weeks of charge. I have had zero issues. I wish all gadgets were like this.

I still use my Kindle 4, because it's the last version to have buttons, without having a crazy form factor. It was also $100, which is in the absolute max a Kindle should cost. None of the later version have peeked my interest, because I don't gain anything, compared to my 12 year old Kindle. Prices have gone up, but I've lost the physical button, so I pay more to lose a feature I really like. Amazon could have more or less stopped Kindle development in 2012 and just worked on reducing the cost ever since and it would still have been a great e-reader.

> Are you normally reading in a moving vehicle or something? Indeed I am! My primary use case for the kindle is to use it on the train. > which has much larger touch zones than the normal Kindle software. That may actually be the reason why. The regular software is extremely sensitive to gestures and has small touch zones, so it's easy to miss the zone, or trigger a gesture, instead of clicking what you want to click. I also frequently have to go back a page or two and re-read a section or two, so if I read physical books I always have my fingers placed so I can go back a page or two easily, and on the kindle that works a lot less reliably (especially due to the ~500ms latency on the paperwhite). Wheras on the Kindle 4 with the forward/back buttons on both sides it was really convenient to actually go back and forth (and instant, as flipping a page back or forth on the kindle 4 never triggered a full display refresh)

Sure you can, just get an older one. I'm very happy with my jailbroken Kindle 4 running KOReader. AFAIK re-registering won't brick it, you can still sideload just fine. We should be normalizing a separation of device and ecosystem. These are for consuming books , it's not an awful inconvenience to sideload every 19 hours of consumption to queue up the next read.

I replaced the battery on my kindle 4 not that long ago. It had the best UX for extended reading when compared to newer kindles. The biggest downside was not having a frontlit display. I recently switch to an xteink x4, and found that several others in that community migrated from kindle 4s as well. So there are still some number of users in the world that value the device.

My Kindle 4 hardware works great, I still read it nightly. Since it doesn’t feel like it’s obsolete (in fact it has physical buttons so may be slightly better than a modern Kindle), it feels like a blatant cash grab by Amazon to get us to buy new devices that probably are laden with ads or other revenue generators.

Well, it would be nice to be able to use my Kindle 4 again... Thanks to KOReader, it's no longer a brick, but most of my ebooks are kept hostages at Amazon.

I found this guide to converting an old Kindle 4 to display anything from the web super useful. https://matthealy.com/kindle I bought another 3 used kindles for $20 each after getting it to work.