On the left is my Kindle Colorsoft. On the right is my Kindle Voyage. I thought about cleaning them up for the shot but I think it drives home just how often the two devices are used.
A Brief History of My Kindle Usage
My first Kindle (Gen 2) was purchased in 2009. One of the older, “clunkier” models with the big side buttons and the built in keyboard. I used it a good bit. Kept it largely on airplane mode and “side-loaded” it from downloaded content.
When the storms hit Huntsville back in April 2011, that Kindle was used to keep track with the outside world and I used a mixture of it and a old flip phone to order equipment we needed to survive.
In 2012, I upgraded to the Kindle Paperwhite. Looking on Wikipedia (LGT: “Amazon Kindle Devices”), seems like I would have gotten one of the first ones.
For five or so years, the Paperwhite was my primary reading device though I honestly do not recall how often I read from it. Often, I would say. Around here, somewhere, I probably started to read Kindle books as often on app and website.
Voyage and Colorsoft
I got a Kindle Voyage in 2017. Oddly enough, it was the Oasis that caused this. I was interested in a new Kindle and Oasis was getting a lot of hype but for whatever reason, the Oasis simply did not gel with me and I ended up with the Voyage as “a replacement.”
For the next eight years, it was the center of my reading life. Now, this was also the time after Barbara’s birth and then COVID and then the accident so it was kind of a weird time for me to read. I read pretty frequently, but we’re talking about maybe thirty books per year compared to three times that a few years prior.
I really liked it. It was often in my bookbag to pull out when I wanted to read for a bit. It also has a bit of personal history for me:
That sticker, I think, came from one of the last outings before the accident made it hard for me to go to such things [and roughly impossible to carry Barbara around on my shoulders]. We were going to see some test launch in May 2022 and I don’t recall what it is because of reasons [a couple of months before and after the accident are only skeletal in my thoughts, the trauma kind of melted most things away] but I snagged a sticker promoting the then upcoming Artemis mission.
I might be conflating two different events, but that’s ok.
Here’s one of my favorite pictures and B and me…
I was absolutely enjoying the heck out of the Voyage with possibly two complaints:
- It had 3GB which seems like a lot of space for an e-reader but my ebook library [not including all the comics and definitely not including all the RPGs] is around 6-7 +gig. Tossing in comics and RPGs and it’s 60+ gigabytes [maybe 100+ gig]. I was already having to decide which books to keep and which ones to delete.
- It was a bit sluggish, really. It was clearly meant to handle smaller amounts of books without a lot of on-screen manipulation.
Still, the inertia of having to reload 1000s of ebooks kept me uninterested for years, until finally Christmas 2024: Kaz bought me a Kindle Colorsoft as a gift.
Around here, we were already planning to move to Belgium so I held on to it. After the move, once I confirmed it would work and I would not just be bricking a device, I started using it. I cannot buy a new Kindle [if I wanted to, which I don’t] and have it shipped due to geography-lock but it seems like setting up one already bought with an already established account works ok. For now, at least.
For the past year, it has been an astounding e-reader. It works more or less like I expect an e-reader to act. Nearly every complaint I have about it is based on Amazon’s own stupid restrictions to handling non-Kindle content. The enforced ecosystem stuff is dumb.
Which has started to be a problem because there are some books here or there from other sources I’ve been trying to read and I end up having to use various work-arounds to avoid using the Send to Kindle feature which works ok but is awful in the metadata (and oopsie-boopsies the covers because, I assume, of entirely petty reasons and nothing else).
Then…something occurred to me.
The Return Voyage
You know things are bad when Youtube starts recommending videos about jailbreaking Kindles to you. Like, out of the blue. I didn’t go “how jailbreak kindle pls?!” or anything.
Seeing how much they are pushing AI to be pre-loaded on the newer Kindles, maybe soon. Not yet, though.
It did get me thinking. I like the e-ink display. I considering Amazon’s Ember to be my favorite e-reading font [fun fact, I just realized while writing this post that I could download Amazon’s Kindle fonts]. I have been using ReadEra for my phone but something about the interface was missing a little bit. I like it a lot but I missed the vibe of an e-ink book.
Sure, there are Kobo e-readers. Those are a pretty big deal here. Just…you know, more gristle for the pig-farm. Also, via BOL.com I have picked up a few Kobo ebooks and having them locked by third party DRM is not in any real way an improvement. At this point you can’t even say something like “But they are more customer supportive!” because no company likes customers anymore. They only time they pretend to like customers is when there is a bigger fish is in the pond and the pretense of customer service is baked into a business model. Everyone is just waiting to sell out to said bigger fish so the cycle can continue.
What I want is an e-ink reader that jumps straight to KOReader and 100%, absolutely, is not primarily a storefront masquerading as a device. Not necessarily a e-ink display tablet that can also do my taxes. Just like…locked the hell down to launching KOReader. That sort of thing. Let me pay €200 and get 64GB + e-ink + an app that can read pretty much all the “open” ebook formats.
Yesterday, I finally realized that thanks to Calibre, it is relatively trivial to convert any of my ebooks to a format that a 2017-era Kindle can read and a 2017-era Kindle is from the time when Amazon was still considering side-loading to be a primary access point. They may have started discouraging it by that point, but they were mostly fine with it. Books were stored on the device with names like
- The Shadow King of Lancelot Book 17 (Light Novel The Shadow King of Lancelot Series)
As opposed to things like
- BR1922298Q1521_azw
I got my Voyage out, got out an old charger, and then spent a fair amount of time recharging it. Let it get through all the stuff it needed to get through to wake back up after a year of not being used. Relatively updated. Relatively synched. All that.
Then I told to say goodbye to mama.
Turned on Airplane mode, hooked it up to computer, and viola. Spent last night reading the back half of a Reggie Oliver Book. Today will be finishing up The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie (may I recommend StandardEbooks version if you would like a free copy?).
It made me very wistful for a time when companies like Valancourt and Tartarus Press would just sell you ebooks directly instead of having to go through Amazon. I assume a variety of reasons drove such a thing.
It is madness how much ebooks have been tainted in such a short period of time.
Over time, I’ll probably remove most of the Kindle books off of the Voyage and just it exclusively for other ebooks without going through send-to-Kindle [not least because I just assume Amazon is gobbling those up to support its AI].
It’s a terrible boorish workaround but it is nice to bring back my Voyage without it simply being “yet another Kindle” in my collection.
Once support officially ends for the pre-2013 Kindles, might be time to start properly hacking my old Paperwhite. Just to see.
At this time, not really planning on getting another Kindle unless something big changes in their ecosystem. Let’s see how long these two last.