The Kindle was an incredible device for 2012. E-ink display, 2-4GB of storage, wifi, ability to download thousands of books, purchase and borrow new books wirelessly, play games, and battery that could last for weeks. We bought one new back then, but it’s tied to my wife’s account and I don’t want to lose access to the books on it or accidentally brick it. $30 and a week later, I have another Kindle 4 Non-Touch shipped to my door courtesy of an eBay seller.
Obviously, DRM’s upside for content owners is protecting themselves from IP theft. The downside for everyone else is being treated like a criminal. I just want to read the books I legitimately have access to on any device I own without a whole bunch of rigamarole, authentications, and nonsense.
Fortunately this Kindle is so old mature that many of the content and firmware problems that might have once existed and somewhat solved. Using Calibre, I can remove the DRM off the books I have on our original Kindle and drop them onto this NTM1 Kindle. If I go so far as to jailbreak this Kindle, I can install new screensavers which would be a super cool upgrade. I followed the various slightly-new-hostile guides through the MobileRead forums and wiki, and even successfully jailbroke the Kindle, installed new cool screensavers, and brought over books through Calibre. The one downside was2 big enough that I kept pushing.
That one downside was that while books on a stock Kindle appear on the main screen where you can page through them all, you can also add them to custom “Collections” where once they’ve been assigned to one, they’ll disappear from view on the main screen where they are now only visible in the one or more Collections to which they’ve been assigned. It essentially operates much as a “tagging” system. Well, after bringing over the books via Calibre, apparently the process removes something from the metadata for the books that permits the Kindle device to flag them for non-displaying on the main screen. The result is that while books can still be assigned to collections, they’ll also still clutter up the main screen. Obviously, I there’s no way I can deal with this, so I decided to explore other options.
Once you’ve got your Kindle jailbroken, you can start to do things like SSH into it, change some core settings, and otherwise just tinker around changing things and ripping stuff out. While I didn’t brick this device, I did get it to the point where it would neither enter a debug mode nor permit me to access it over USB to sideload books via Calibre. I don’t trust the Amazon email delivery system well enough to want to send de-DRM’ed books to the address Amazon so graciously assigned the Kindle, so that option is out.
This has lead me to a factory reset, fresh Kindle, and the need to enter my ridiculously long WiFi network password and Amazon account password back into the Kindle via the 5 key directional pad.
Wish me luck.
Kindle 4 Non Touch Customization