Good e-Reader broke the news a couple of months ago, that Amazon was planning on disabling the Kindle Bookstore on a number of older e-readers on August 17th, 2022. As of today, you’ll no longer be able to browse for, buy, or borrow books directly from certain Kindle devices introduced 10+ years ago. What models are discontinued? Kindle (2nd Gen), Kindle DX, Kindle Keyboard, Kindle (4th Gen), and Kindle (5th Gen).
Although the bookstore has been shut off, any books you have on your Kindle can continue to be read. If you want to buy new books these e-readers, you need to login to your Amazon account on an internet browser and buy books and they will be automatically delivered to the Kindle Cloud. Once the books have been purchased you can visit your library and download them to your device and then start reading. Obviously this process is not as intuitive as accessing the bookstore directly on your Kindle, but this is the only way if you want to continue reading.
Amazon has been emailing people who still have the discontinued models attached to their accounts and offering free credit to buy a modern Kindle and also ebook credit to sweeten the deal. I would recommend if you are still using an older model to upgrade, for a couple of reasons. The E INK screens on these models are either using Vizplex or Pearl, which doesn’t have the greatest resolution and have ghosting problems. Modern Kindles have new e-paper technology such as E INK Carta HD and E INK Carta 1200. You also have to consider the battery life, lithium ion batteries can only function on a certain number of charge cycles, before the capacity starts to dimmish. Instead of the e-reader lasting for weeks or a month before a recharge, older Kindles will barely last a couple of days.
If you have an Kindle that can no longer access the bookstore, I would recommend the base model Kindle Paperwhite 11th generation. You can normally get it on sale for around $100 and will easily last you 10+ years before you need to upgrade. This model has a 300 PPI display, which will ensure your fonts are razer sharp when reading, page turn speed is faster and via firmware updates, you will always have new features and enhancements.
This is the first time Amazon has ever shut off access to the bookstore on any Kindle. Hopefully this is not a trend, where they slowly start to discontinue additional models and only support the previous and latest generation and alienating customers.
The post Amazon officially disables the bookstore on older Kindle e-reader first appeared on Good e-Reader.