You can do a lot of the same things with a jailbroken Kindle and KindleForge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4ZliC82RtA

You can jailbreak your kindle and get similar functionality through KOReader plugins https://omer-faruq.github.io/appstore.koplugin/

Give Rakuten your money!

I'm not. I want my Kindle to do ONE job well, not turn into another multi-purpose device.

I too would like my Kindle to do one single thing well. Sadly, we seem to be waiting for that future to arrive.

I remember when my PaperWhite glitched while I was attempting to jailbreak it and got stuck with the screen inverted. It was great! I can't believe I have to jailbreak a reader to get that simple functionality for better in-the-dark reading. (epilogue: I let it run out of battery and the inversion was gone upon boot)

You don't need to jailbreak it. Swipe from the top and press the big button labelled "dark mode".

It is a somewhat newish feature, I think pre-2020 models don't have dark mode, afaik (and I have no idea how are old devices supported on kindle, I assume launch and forget, could be wrong though).

It seems Amazon has financial and legal incentive to keep older Kindles (it is so many of them still) updated to avoid them getting jailbroken and not having Kindle store at their fingertips :)

Not sure if they cut it off at some point, but they can surely keep updating 10 yo devices.

I don't have this option, though admittedly I haven't updated in a while to leave the option for jailbreaking open.

Yeah, I was going to say. I only installed KOReader because my Kindle Touch has lackluster ereader functionality.

I still miss the UI on my old Kindle Keyboard, which only showed the book list without an attempt at curation/upselling.

I can simulate it by staying on the "Library" tab, but it tends to forget halfway frequently.

It is totally different to be able to do something versus actually doing it.

It is not because you can install and run apps that you have to.

That's what's great about open hardware. You still have the ability to do that. Even if the original vendor of the device tries to decide differently.

I'm like yours, But there are things that makes me angry. I cannot for example read Farsi books. I cannot put a new e-pub into my kindle and I have to send it over the web; there are many things like these. And so I just want to have a nicer reader that I myself control.

So... don't use it, idk?

the one job that it does well is show you ads lmao (in case you haven't jailbreaked your Kindle yet)

Not to defend amazon but you can remove the ads by paying to remove them, they sell one model ad supported and another that doesn't have ads if you buy the ads supported you can remove it later.

Depends on what you consider "ads": I have always been paying for ad-free experience, but I regularly end up on the screen where there are ads for books I do not care about (they probably say that's just the store homepage, but I do my shopping on the laptop).

Your Kindle is an appliance you have little control over, the Kobo in this scope is a multitool. More choice is better than less choice as it relates to device ownership and control, imho.

https://www.fulu.org/

HN Search: enshittification - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Along with choice comes complexity. More things to break, security problems, distractions, etc. Purpose-built devices like the Kindle and Switch do one thing well; this looks like it does a lot more things but mostly poorly.

Everyone already has at least one multitool, the smartphone. Most also have a tablet and/or a laptop. While this project looks like a cool hack, I don't see much practical use for another multitool with a weak CPU, laggy screen, and poor input.

I used KOReader for my Kindle and I never looked back. The software that Amazon ships is simply insulting. It's like when I installed Linux on my laptop instead of Windows. KOReader is a massive upgrade for any Kindle.

That's because you don't actually own the kindle.

I was too, so I used Claude to port Plato to my Paperwhite 3: https://github.com/adriaanm/plato

It also has a cli to let you push docs over WiFi. Oh, and a HN reader. I have another repo with the user space I use, but need to clean that up before making it public.