Transcription

This is not your Kindle. It belongs to Amazon, and they can delete your books, ban your account, even shut down the ability to download your own purchases. So I jailbroke mine. It took less than 10 minutes, no soldering, no tools, and now I can do way more than Amazon ever intended for this thing. Let me show you how to actually de-Amazon your Kindle and all the incredible reasons why you want to do this in the first place. All right, so why jailbroke a Kindle? What's the point? What does it actually let you do? Now, there's plenty of reasons to go out and jailbreak your Kindle. Of course, stuff like adding custom readers, support for EPUB books, custom lock screens, running Linux, smart home applications. But to me, the biggest reason is the ability to completely disconnect from Amazon services entirely. That's what I want you to remember from leaving this video. It's more about ownership than anything else. All right, now here's the thing. I'm the techie guy. I can explain to you all the technical scummy stuff that Amazon does to keep you locked in and show you technical ways to get around it. But I'll be honest, I'm not too familiar with this space or the state of the e-book scene in general. The big reason I started looking into this stuff was because it was really important to my girlfriend. She loves to read. So I figured I should probably ask a friend who's way more familiar in the space than I am. And I guess that somebody would be me. Hi, I'm Jared Henderson. I run a channel that's all about books and philosophy. I'm a friend of Jeff's, but more importantly for this video, I've been a longtime user of Kindles. My dad got me my first Kindle when I went off to college and I've carried my Kindle with me basically everywhere I've gone for probably about a decade now. I've taken it on international trips. They're fantastic to just put in your backpack or to have on a plane. I even keep my Kindle next to my bed so that I can read books before I go to sleep. In a wide range of scenarios, Kindles are just more convenient than physical books. And so I really like having one and using one. But over the last couple of years, I've become more worried about Amazon and about its relationship to the wider book market. See, Amazon actually controls about 80% of the e-book market. So that means that the decisions that they make about their devices or about how they handle e-books matter more than basically any other marketplace. And there've been a couple of stories that really got me worried. A couple of years ago, a woman's Amazon account was suspended. And one of the consequences of having your Amazon account suspended is that you lose access to all of your digital purchases. That means all of your e-books too. And now Amazon could suspend your account for basically any reason. And in that woman's case, they wouldn't even tell her what she had done wrong. So she tried to appeal it, but she didn't even know how to appeal it because again, she didn't know what she was being accused of. Now let's say that my Amazon account got suspended. What would be the consequence? Well, if I didn't have my books backed up locally, I would lose, I think about a thousand books. Like I said, I use my Kindle a lot. I own a lot of those e-books, but that's the thing, right? I don't really own them. I've just long-term licensed them from Amazon and Amazon can take them away from me. Amazon's also done a few things where they've changed content after I've bought books. A couple of years ago, Amazon acquired the rights to the Wheel of Time. It's a fantasy series that I really like and they were gonna turn it into a television show. As part of their push, their marketing push, they updated all of the covers of the Wheel of Time e-books, even for people who had already bought them. That meant that my e-book covers got changed to ads, essentially, that were promos for this new TV show. Now, look, I was excited when that TV show came out, right? It turns out to not be that great, so I stopped watching, but I was excited, but that's kind of irrelevant. I didn't want my book covers being turned into ads because actually when I had bought my Kindle, there had been an option to pay like $10 more for an ad-free device, but then they turned my book covers essentially into ads and that just didn't sit right with me. If they can change book covers, well, they can actually change anything because they control the master copies, right? It's all in the cloud and your device will just update. And then, of course, Amazon took away our right to download those files directly onto our computers. Arguably, they did this to stop people from doing what I like to do, which is to store copies locally and even to strip them of DRM. They probably don't like that. They don't like that people are doing that with those files, so they're just quietly removing those options. In the end, I think really it comes down to one issue and that's that somebody is gonna own these books and if I'm the one paying for them, I want that somebody to be me. So yeah, the recent update to the way that we can save our eBooks we bought from Amazon were the last straw for a lot of people. And while backing up my books, I discovered an entire world of jailbreaking Kindles. And after seeing what's possible, I genuinely believe that everyone, genuinely everyone should be jailbreaking their Kindles if they haven't already. And don't worry, jailbreaking your Kindle is way safer and easier than you probably think. My girlfriend isn't techie at all and she was able to do hers in like 10 minutes. It won't permanently mess up your Kindle in any way and it's completely reversible in case you don't like it or you wanna sell it to a friend. And yes, this is all 100% legal. The reason I'm covering this is because even if you're not like a super tech expert, the Kindle that you bought is yours and you have every right to maintain ownership of your stuff regardless if Amazon likes it or not. So let's get a few things out of the way. Any Kindle on any firmware from any year can be jailbroken. Heck, I literally bought a brand new in box one and it was jailbroken 20 minutes later. And no, this doesn't require opening the device or anything. All you need is a USB-C cable and a computer. Now, if your Kindle is over 10 years old, like 2015 or something, the process might be a little different, but for most Kindles, it's gonna be the same process across the board. There's an awesome written guide called the Kindle Modding Wiki that covers this entire process in detail, including the download links for the files that you might need. I promise it's not as scary as you think. First, we're gonna download the jailbreak from the wiki guide. It's called Winter Break. Now, it's gonna download a .tar file. You gotta double click it and it'll extract everything into a folder. This has all of the files you need to copy over to your Kindle. Now, by default, some files that need to be transferred over are actually hidden. On Mac, I find that you can do a keyboard shortcut, Command, Shift, period, and it'll show the hidden files. And don't worry about these two GitHub folders. That's not important. We just need the active content folder. All right, let's set up our Kindle real quick. All we gotta do on this side is just set it into airplane mode and plug it in. Now, grab all of those files and just drag them over all the way to your Kindle. All right, now let's restart our Kindle. It's gonna take a little while. Damn, for a brand new device, these things are kind of slow. All right, once we're back, we're gonna try and tap on any of the Kindle store books. Doesn't matter which one. It's gonna ask you, hey, notice that you're in airplane mode. Did you wanna connect to Wi-Fi? And you're gonna hit yes. It's gonna flash a few times and then, oh, what's that? Looks like your Kindle got infected by a mosquito or something. And check out this quote, by the way. I bet it has a really sick double meaning that I'm not smart enough to understand. Anyways, it's just gonna do this by itself for a little while. You don't have to touch anything. Then eventually, you'll see a message saying it's done. And to install the hotfix. The hotfix just lets the jailbreak persist on your Kindle. Even if you turn it off and on again, log in and out, you get it. Now, the hotfix is just a .bin file. Don't try and extract this. There's no need. Just drag it onto your Kindle. Okay, now we can unplug the cable and exit back out into the homepage. From there, tap the three dots, go to settings, and then update your Kindle. It's gonna think there's a new update, but it's really just a hotfix. Tap update, a three-minute restart later, you're gonna see a new book in your library. Don't worry. As long as you don't update your Kindle, which you don't really need to, you only have to run this once. Tap on it, another restart, and that's it. You're done. You're officially jailbroken. Okay, great. But everything still looks the same. What gives? Well, now there's nothing stopping us from actually running whatever apps and tools that we want to install. That's what this whole setup process was about. But in order to do that, we need to install two really important things. MRPI, which is your package installer. This is the stuff that we need to actually install apps. And COOL, which is Kindle Unified Application Launcher, which will, you know, actually let us run the apps that we installed. So one can install the packages for you, and the other one can run the packages for you. Does that make sense? Now, this is kind of where the process for different Kindles kind of diverge. So I won't go into specifics. Definitely check out the wiki so you know what to pick, but it's basically the same thing. Plug in the Kindle, drag and drop some files, do some weird ritual on the Kindle that would make zero sense outside of this context. And now you have cool on your Kindle. Now, when you first open it, there's not going to be anything in there. But when we go install some packages, we can open them here. So what do we install now that your Kindle is jailbroken? The first thing, literally the first thing you're going to want to install is Co-Reader. It basically replaces your Kindle stock interface and adds a bunch of new features that Amazon just refuses to give you. And the biggest feature, in my opinion, is the ability to just drag and drop EPUBs and PDFs onto your Kindle, which are the most popular type of book format files. Now you're probably asking, but Jeff, wait, doesn't Amazon already have a tool for this? You know, the Send to Kindle app? Not really, actually. The Kindle like straight up doesn't support EPUB and PDF files. So what the Send to Kindle app does is take your EPUB, convert it into their proprietary encrypted format, and then send that over to your Kindle. You can't just drag a book onto it and start reading, not without Amazon's help at least. But it can read them with the help of an app, like Co-Reader. So why doesn't Amazon support files like EPUBs and PDFs? Money. It's money. I really wish there was like some super deep technical reason for this, but no, this is purely a business decision. See, for Amazon, the Kindle is about selling you books through their store. It's not an e-reader, it's a storefront. They don't care about selling you a good e-reader. They care about selling you books. And on top of that, they've already dropped support for the Send to Kindle app for devices older than 2013, which means if you're relying on Amazon's cloud service to send over your books, they've proven that one day they're just gonna turn it off. Now, Co-Reader on the other hand can read a lot of different file formats and importing books is much simpler. Oh, nice. It's literally just a file browser. Oh, cool, cool, cool, cool. So you can literally just plug in your computer, make a folder called books, drag in all your EPUBs and... There's my books folder. Oh, nice. It comes up with the cover art too. That is really nice. It's grabbed all the cover art for all my books. Well, except this one. What do I have in there? I think this is a good mix of everything. That's really cool. Once you open a book, that's where Co-Reader really starts showing off what it can do. Compared to the stock reader that ships with the Kindle, this one gives you so much more control over everything. You can do stuff like two column mode for every book on any device, which Amazon restricts to only their more expensive models. You can pick between page view and continuous scrolling, which is kind of neat. Oh, and you're gonna love this. You know the little stock Kindle wallpapers or those boring promo ads they put when you put your Kindle to sleep? Check it out. Yeah, Co-Reader lets you install custom screensavers so you can really make your Kindle completely unique. You can have it so when you lock it, it shows the cover of the book that you're reading, kind of like a real book now that I think about it. You can have it show the progress of the book that you're reading or just general reading metrics for the week. The lady doesn't like this one. She tells me apparently some people don't like knowing how much time they spent reading. Or you can just have it cycle through whatever pictures you want. I put some of these Ghibli ones for my girlfriend. Oh, the girlies are gonna go crazy for this. I just know it. I ended up making some of my own. I know my girlfriend really likes the artwork from Yoshitomo Nara. So I tossed one of his museum pieces into Photoshop. I posterized it, turned it black and white and check it out. The lady loved it and it really makes your Kindle feel just that much more unique. It's just another way to de-Amazon your Kindle. Oh, and for those who like using Calibre, you're gonna love this. Built-in wireless syncing with Calibre. If you have a giant library already set up or you're constantly adding to your collection, you can just grab the books you want from your Calibre library and just send it over to your Kindle wirelessly. It's like Amazon's Send to Kindle app, but without Amazon breathing down your neck. They can't take this away from you. And there's a bunch of different plugins for CodeReader that can add to your experience. I didn't have time to check out a lot of them, but two that did stand out to me was AskGPT, which just prompts to check GPT search bar mid-reading, which I'm sure is really helpful in some situations. And another one called Rakuyomi and it basically acts as a search engine specifically for manga. It can search sources and find and download chapters straight from your Kindle. I'm actually not too familiar with manga, so there's like duplicates of these. I'm just going to do whatever, but like, yeah, it's really simple. Yeah, one shot. It's really simple. I don't think there's a difference between the different versions. I think they all kind of do the same thing. I don't know, what's this? There is a big difference between the different versions. Definitely do your research on that. And there is so much more that I can't cover here. There's stuff like plugins, news feeds, OCR. Seriously, CodeReader not only gives you the freedom to transfer whatever books and formats that you want, it completely transforms the way you experience them on your Kindle too. You can genuinely stop here and already be getting the most out of your jailbreak. Oh, and I know some of you are probably wondering if you could still rip your purchased Kindle books even after Amazon kind of patched the old method. And the answer is yes, using Colibri too. But I couldn't get that section done in time for this video. And honestly, I've noticed that tutorial sections tend to tank my viewer retention and videos. So instead, I'm going to be putting a full walkthrough on how to do this on my Patreon. Don't worry, I'm making this completely free. You don't have to pay or anything to watch it. It's just there for people who care enough to seek it. And it's in a safer spot in case Amazon tries to strike my channel for showing you this. Link is going to be in the description in case you weren't able to back up your books in time. So CodeReader really is the big app. But what else can you install? So believe it or not, there's a surprising amount of homebrew games that have been made for the Kindles. Now, don't expect Cyberpunk running on this thing, but there's still quite a bit here that's kind of impressive. A lot of these games are launched using something called Ktern, which is basically a terminal emulator for your Kindle. Apparently, this is also what Amazon uses internally to debug the Kindle. So for example, somebody did a straight up port of Tetris. Cool. Use the keyboard to navigate through all this. And you know, other than the god awful frame rate, it's surprisingly intuitive. Oh no. Also, looking back at this footage now, I just realized the weird characters on the left side actually spell out Tetris. Yeah, I actually couldn't pick that up when I was playing. This is fun, Jesus. And of course, we can't forget about Minesweeper, a really competent version, honestly. Oh, come on. Oh, hell yeah. How does this not crash the Kindle? Jesus. This game also came bundled with a bunch of other puzzle games that I'm too dumb to play, but there is a lot of them here. But this is as far as I got. Like you, I was also wondering, like, where are the classics here? Where's like, you know, Sudoku, Crossword, Snake Game. And I kept running into the same wall. I would download necessary files and then it just wouldn't work. Then someone would be like, oh, no, you're actually supposed to download this file. It runs way smoother. Still doesn't work. So I would go back to the forum to see if I miss anything. And oh my God, this project is 12 years old. Yeah. So a lot of these projects are really old and are no longer being maintained. It's a really big problem. It's not like there's no documentation for the Kindle. It's just that most of it is over a decade old. But I kept looking and I managed to find something that I think is really, really cool. This is Gambit, and it's a Game Boy emulator for the Kindle. Two frames a page. If you ever saw the 144 piece screen of the original Game Boy, I thought, man, I wish there was a way to make this run worse. Well, here you go. OK, because I think my microwave has more power than this thing does. I've downloaded a few games, but I was told that I'm not expected to have many of them work. Oh, my God. Let me get that speed on high. I'm going to need that. Oh, oh, that's not good. That's not what I meant. But that's not what I meant. The screen doesn't refresh fast enough to be able to see what the colors are. Oh, that's hard to look at. Can you see what those colors are? Because I can't tell which direction is facing what? OK, let's try something else. Oh, dude, that's quick save. No way, dude. Oh, man, the refresh rate is just killer on this thing. It's destroying it. Yeah, this is this is rough. Do you know what I mean? I mean, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do. This is rough, dude. Actually, wait a minute. This might not be terrible because I'm just like pressing A. No, it's still pretty bad. I yeah, I don't. Oh, my God. Oh, that's unplayable. I cannot play like this. There's no way I got to get into it. I got to get into a fight. I got to get at least one fight. I wouldn't expect you actually like finish a whole game like this. It's not it's not it's not going to happen. Yeah. You know what? Squirtle is fine. We'll take Squirtle. Where my Squirtle is at? Wait, no, actually, it's so slow. You know, I'm so sad because I feel like if it wasn't for the weird refresh rate, this would be pretty playable. It doesn't seem like a processing power thing. My poor Squirtle is like melting over there. Look at him. Now, this one only works on older Kindles. The app needs to be recompiled to actually get this running on newer Kindles. Still, it's really impressive that this is running on what's essentially a smartwatch display. If you want to check these out, a lot of these can be downloaded from the Kindle modding discord. I'll leave a link in the description. Tell the Jeff said hi. So let's talk about scripts, which are cool bits of code created by the community that can tweak your Kindle even more. There's two ways to run scripts, either by typing them into the Kterm app, but that takes a while. So what most people do is they use a program called USB net light, which lets you SSH into your Kindle so you can type and send and receive stuff through a computer instead of typing on that two FPS keyboard. Once you're SSH in, you can start loading up some really cool scripts. For example, I had to pay 20 bucks to remove those stupid ads on my girlfriend's Kindle since she got the ad supported version, even though that was like six years ago now. And you can't use the custom screensavers until you get rid of the special offers, either by paying or by having a model that doesn't come with them. Actually, well, there is a way to get rid of these ads, but it seems like no Kindle dev wants to touch that for fear of accidentally pissing off Amazon. Well, anyway, I don't care. So here's a script. You run it, you get rid of all your ads. You don't have to pay 20 bucks. Go have fun. There's this script that'll connect to a URL of your choice and then full screen the page to make it look like a native app. And there's a lot of possibilities for this, like a synced up to do list on Notion. A lot of people like to set this up to their home assistant so it can display a bunch of really nice, glanceable dashboard screens. I think this is really great for a lot of older Kindles that are kind of just sitting around the drawers and find new ways to repurpose them. Only thing is I couldn't find any wall mounts for the more recent paper Kindle designs. Yeah, as it turns out, there's not a lot of people modding these to run home assistant on them. So with the help of my buddy, JP, we came up with a really quick, easy wall mount with screws and a charging hole so we can still plug it in when necessary. Then I was able to send it off to PCBWay and in a few days, they got me my design. It was really, really neat. It's like a really good quality stuff here. Jesus. Yeah, a lot of people ask me what they should do if they don't have a 3D printer, but they still want to like print out a proper model design and PCBWay is perfect for that type of stuff. They also sponsored this video, so big thanks to them for that. They have all types of different materials you can think of too, from basic PLA for what I use like this model for, all the way up to stainless steel. Whatever you can design, they can make it. And you'll even have a specific agent assigned to you so they can look over your design, make sure that it'll properly print, make sure that it's all good, and make sure that there's no issues with your model before sending it out to you. Yeah, a lot of people don't know that you can get 3D prints done through PCBWay. If you want to try for yourself, you can use my code DAMMITTEN for $10 off your first order. Try it out. Let me know what you think. And big thanks to them for sponsoring this video. Only reason that there's not more of these scriptlets is because there's no documentation on how to actually make them. But as I was writing this video, the main jailbreak dev finally pushed documentation on how to make these, so go have at it. I'll put a link to their Discord in the description so you can go check out all the other scriptlets that other people have made. So let's talk about running Linux. So yeah, believe it or not, it's possible to just straight up run a full version of Linux on your Kindle. And it's surprisingly easy to set up. There's a great guide on GitHub on how to get this running, but honestly, it's a little updated. So basically what you do is you download this, drag this entire folder into your extensions folder on your Kindle, then tap this to download the latest version of Alpine Linux, give it a few minutes to install everything, run a quick reboot, and just launch Alpine Desktop. It's literally that easy. The best part of this is it doesn't entirely wipe away your stock Kindle OS. You could still use this like any other cool app. And once you're done with it, you can just restart your Kindle and you're back to your Kindle OS. So there's like zero compromises. I change the orientation rotation. Aha. Yeah, dude, this is just like, that's straight up desktop. Like it has stuff. It has a CD-ROM. Can I plug in a flash drive, do you think? Hold on. Okay, no flash drive, but I have an SSD that I think I could probably use for this. Let's give that a shot. Oh, wait, it's on this side. Whoops. Okay, Darren. Yeah, it seems like it doesn't really want to work. Can I Chromium? Oh, dude, it's just straight up Google Chrome. So my big problem right now is Chromium's keyboard just doesn't work at all. Look, I log back out. It has the keyboard, but I can't. What is it? Alpine? It clearly has a keyboard. I just won't let me use it in Chrome. I got it. I got it. It's a little square down here. Look, little square. Man, there's the keyboard. All right. There I am. Look. Oh, dude, hell yeah. You know, it's actually running somehow better than the built-in browser. Let's do my newest video. Oh, man, ads, bro. Oh, God. Wait, this is my video. I make a living off of this. Oh, my God. Everything just gets so much funnier when you run into like a digital Kindle display. Oh, look, it's Jeff. It's 2-Bit Jeff. Yeah, why should I be the only one that's being made fun of? Hold on. Oh, yeah, now we're cooking. This is what I see when I'm in sleep paralysis. I have an idea. What if I did? Oh, dude. Oh, we're so back. Hold on. Let me full screen this. Oh, hell yeah. Oh, we're so back. Let's play this. Oh, we're in. Oh, boy, we're going to pull two frames per sometimes. Oh, man, this is bad. I forgot the Kindle doesn't have multi-touch. So it's really got to pick and choose when we shoot name here. And on top of that, I can't even see anything. OK, but look, it runs. I can shoot amongst other things. Yeah, see that? Look at that. What button was that? Yeah, well, you get the idea. A heads up, though. You do need to have a minimum of two gigs to run this, which might be an issue on older Kindle since those ship with like eight gigs max. I'm not too creative enough to figure out what to do with this, but I would love to hear what kind of cool stuff this would be useful for. This basically turns your Kindle into a super lightweight computer and no one talks about it for some reason. So this is as far as I was able to dig up on the Kindle. I hope you're starting to see like what's really possible with this thing. Like you can really just strip out everything Amazon related and make it completely yours. The longer we wait, the longer Amazon is going to try to chip away at the things that we own. And while sure, it would be nice to be able to just tell everyone to go and buy a Kobo so you don't have to deal with all this. A lot of people already own Kindles. I feel like it's better to educate them on Amazon's reach and give them the knowledge to get around it. You know, give them a choice at least. And honestly, I think the crazy thing is that I would have never looked into this scene if it wasn't for my girlfriend bringing it up to me, that she was concerned about what would happen to her e-books. I didn't really get the big deal. I mean, they're e-books. Who cares, right? But I asked her more about it, about the community, you know, about her collection. We have books all around the house and those are all hers. She really, really loves to read. I felt bad I never stopped and asked her about these books because the way that she talked about these books is generally so special. Like she generally was just so excited. Each book had a story on how it ended up on her shelves. Some of them were autographed or shipped from a different country. Some she remembers waiting in line to pick up from a pre-order. I bought it because it was banned in like a million schools. So I was like, why? I don't want to talk about the movie. You don't like the movie? It's not, it's not going so well casting wise, but I'll still watch it. Like this was clearly really special for her. And then it clicked for me. This enthusiasm and this cling to holding on to physical copies of the stories that she loves. I've seen this before. It's just a little different. Now in terms of digital copies, I'm familiar with exactly what this looks like. You buy something for full price because you want to do the right thing. Support the people who make your media. You realize the company ultimately still controls what they can do with it. Make decisions about your purchase without ever considering your input. And sometimes even leave you with nothing. And this, this is the same thing. And even if it doesn't affect me, it still affects the people that we care about. So her Kindle is running Co-Reader now and a bunch of other stuff. And she never has to worry about that stuff again. And who knows? Maybe there's someone in your life that you'd want to do this for. I don't know. Okay, that's all I got. Click over here to check out another video. And thank you for watching.