Amazon ends support for older Kindles, disabling book downloads and new purchases

As we reported a few months ago, Amazon has now officially ended support for Kindle and Kindle Fire devices released in 2012 or earlier. Owners of these older e-readers and tablets can no longer buy, borrow, or download new books from Amazon services on the affected devices, although titles already downloaded remain available for reading.

Amazon advises users to keep these devices registered and avoid factory resets, since deregistering or resetting them will prevent the devices from being registered again or used normally. In practice, affected Kindles are now limited to offline reading of content already stored on the device. This is even worse considering that Amazon previously removed the option to download your ALREADY OWNED e-books to a computer via USB.

The change affects models including the Kindle 1st Generation, Kindle DX and DX Graphite, Kindle Keyboard, Kindle 4, Kindle Touch, Kindle 5, Kindle Paperwhite 1st Generation, and Kindle Fire tablets from 2011 and 2012. Amazon is offering upgrade incentives, including a 20% discount on new Kindles and a $20 ebook credit for eligible trade-ins, while some users may still rely on sideloading tools like Calibre or jailbreaking to keep older devices useful, which, to be honest, is understandable given the situation.