What motivated me to make this switch after all these years?
First and foremost, it was the changes that Amazon made in February 2025 to prevent the downloading of Kindle books, and subsequent firmware releases for the Kindle where they patched the jailbreak vulnerabilities and upgraded the encryption used on their books, rendering all previous backup and DRM removal methods ineffective. I’ve previously written about this in On Ebooks and DRM.
Besides the reasons outlined in that post, upon further reflection, there were also other reasons that fueled my resolve to migrate away from the Kindle after so long and onto another platform, which I will attempt to explain now.
User agency
It dawned on me that in a captive ecosystem like the Kindle, I had been sacrificing my user agency, in that I had no control over most of the experience. I could only sideload the books that Amazon decided to allow through their conversion service, or that I could convert to a suitable format with Calibre and copy to my device over USB. In the beginning, this didn’t bother me, but now that the status quo had been changed, who was to say that nothing else would be changed in the future as well?
Ownership and the right to archive
Ownership and the right to archive are right at the heart of the issue here. If I’ve purchased something, and it was sold in such a way as to present that I own this item now, I should have the freedom to take that item elsewhere and use it in reasonable ways. Reading it on a different device or platform is a good example. DVDs aren’t sold locked to a single brand of player, but this is essentially what Kindle and others do with their eBooks, why do we accept and buy into that?
Purchasing vs. renting
Related to the point above, there is a big difference between purchasing and renting. In the case of eBooks, it seems that most people have the expectation that they really own the book, and could download a backup of said book if they wished to. When that facility is removed, the transaction is now more akin to renting something than actually purchasing it to own it, but without any of the financial incentive of lower costs that usually comes with renting. Kindle Unlimited and Spotify for music are two great examples of this model working well for renting or streaming, where the user explicitly opts for this. But with eBooks on the Kindle, you are paying the full price for the book, but without the same rights to the item. That’s a lose-lose situation.
Customisation and tinkering
I’ve been a long-time observer of the Kindle jailbreaks and KOReader, but was never particularly attracted to them while I had a frictionless user experience with the stock firmware. But when that experience is upset by these other decisions and intrusions, then the ability to use alternative firmware or reader software, and to tinker with other things, has increased appeal.
Right to repair
Having the option to repair a device is important to me. There is far too much unnecessary waste in the technology space, and why aren’t eReaders as good a target for this treatment as anything else?