Funny, my old kindle seems to be downloading e-books just fine from my self-hosted server.
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2026
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Tell me more! My partner has an older Kindle, but it's been a while since I've added a book for her.
The magic word is Calibre
Kobo gang where you at?
I have an older Aura that isn't allowed library books. :/
Say it with me kids, “This is why we pirate digital media from billion dollar corporations”
this is also why i started buying physical books and using my local public library again.
My local library allows borrowing ebooks. It's incredibly useful. I own two kindles and haven't spent a dime at Amazon for ebooks. I do buy physical books now and then from there, but only if I really need it and can't find elsewhere.
How do you return a borrowed ebook..?
It expires after two weeks. You can extend, just like borrowing a physical copy. Or return early, in which case it expires upon return.
I have a kindle that I've had for ages. It has been jailbroken for a while and I've been loading my own epubs onto it. They make it easy with the 1 click send to kindle stuff but that locks you in to their ecosystem.
YSK, there's a large number of older Kindles that can be jail broken.
I just ssh pirated .mobi files into mine
Correction: Older kindles can no longer download e-books with the stock rom
Good thing I put mine in airplane mode when I first got it and never updated firmware. I load books like its a flash drive.
I bet Louiss Rossman da goat is already on the case.
Older kindles can still have ebooks transfered directly to them via usb cable
Jokes on Amazon I already jail broke mine and can directly download books from my Calibre server to it, KOreader ftw
Jailbreak then⚡
I've been using raw text files for my books, sent locally over USB, and that's the way it's gonna stay until my reader craps out
can't you just load epub with calibre or another sync to? I'm pretty sure that's what I do because that's what I'm doing
Yeah I strongly prefer epub for chapters and text formatting.
IMO for personal use "drag and drop into the correct directory" is an infinitely better organisational system than tag based libraries, especially for pirated books. I'm not going to sync my books across 10 different devices since I don't need more than 1 reader, so it doesn't make any sense for me to waste time using tags, let alone fix them for every book I download.
Or just drag and drop the epub.
I've tried that in the past, but it doesn't seem to care how the epub is put on it, it always displays epubs horribly
are you doing something to convert to epub from another format? i don't have the issue you're describing when loading epub directly or when converting from mobi with calibre. the format is dynamic unlike PDF, so the font size and page width shouldn't be fixed like that. it should look and behave pretty much like kindle mobi or your text files
Nope. Raw epub to reader and it doesn't handle it.
There's not really any advantage of using txt files over open standard drm-free epubs. You can still generate them yourself using txt editors or publishing software, you can still load them over USB. But epubs give you quality of life features on eReaders like title pages, table of contents, chapter headers, formatting markers like bold and italics.
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Jailbreaking and never turning airplane mode off has been the best decision I made with my kindle. Download from zlibrary, transfer to folder on kindle, done
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I've started to realize that early gen products are often less enshittified, even if they are frequently rough around the edges, and can often be hacked into a useful state unlike the newest hardware. By a few gens in, nearly everything is a giant plastic paperweight that only wants to phone home, download "updates" all the time, and probably needs multiple SSO sign ins and a subscription just to work. I'll keep my old Kindle 4th gen with KOreader until it breaks.
Any suggestions for which Kindle to get off of ebay for jailbreaking purposes, when they start showing up en masse?
Whatever e-reader you get make sure it's one that you can jailbreak to install koreader, beyond that it's just personal preferences. Do you want hardware buttons or a touchscreen? Are you happy with a lower resolution? Do you need integrated light for the display?
Why get something just to jail break it when open alternatives exist?
Pocket Book is the most "open" I believe
Kobo is good and has a store
Onyx, exists, though I couldn't tell you much - they are expensive.
Because old kindles are about to show up on ebay for like $10-20 - how much do those open alternatives cost? They'll be useless bricks to a lot of people - some will figure out how to use them in different ways, some will throw them away, and some will try to sell them for dirt cheap.
why not get a kobo clara bw instead
As someone who owns a Clara bw, I can vouch. They’re good little devices.
Clara colour is also awesome if you're not reading exclusively bw. It does have slightly worse low light visibility because of the filter layers though.
I have a kindle keyboard (2012) and I gave up on amazon a long time ago, now I just convert-upload epubs to it using calibre and read.
More than a decade on, and it's still one of the best kindles ever made, in my opinion.
You had physical buttons instead of a fiddly touch-screen, you could have music, have it read to you, and also go on the internet.
Plus it's old enough it supports a bunch of formats, and registers as a mass storage device to a computer, so anything can use it.
I mean it is very slow, and there are much newer readers supporting open formats. Pocketbook. Even Kobo is alright.
But "Best Kindle", is any jailbroken one I guess
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