The move means owners of Kindles released before 2013 will be unable to download new e-books.

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.

  • REDACTED@infosec.pub
    68·
    2 days ago

    To be fair, 14+ years of supporting a device with software updates does not seem that bad, and the thing if I remember correctly was VERY cheap.

    EDIT: Okay, I’m genuinely confused about the downvotes. Why is 14+ years of device support not good, Lemmy?

    EDIT2: Okay, I see the problem now. Definitely not like phones no longer getting updates, it breaks the core functionality.

    • CatZoomies@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago
      • When support ends, you cannot download any of your purchases.
      • If you factory reset your device, it will not work. Literally, this is what Amazon said. You will not be able to use your device if you ever need to factory reset it.
      • The only thing you can do is read the books you already downloaded.

      It’s perfectly fine to no longer make updates for legacy hardware. But to prevent users from downloading the books they paid for is absurd. Ebooks are just fancy packaged HTML files. No reason Amazon should prevent you from downloading them.

      The average consumer is screwed and will buy a new device. The more technical users will just jailbreak it. Regardless, this will create lots of ewaste as the average consumer is far from technical.

    • jacksilver@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 days ago

      Because it’s a simple e-reader, people should still be able to add books and use the device regardless of store support. They also warn you’ll brick the device if you do a factory reset.

      I thought you could manually add books to kindle, but maybe that isn’t the case based on the article.