Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

More!

Huh, TIL, my gf has a relatively old Kindle, are all the models affected?

She uses Calibre to get her books.

For those of us who will only buy electronics used, kindle is usually the only option. And far cheaper too. So its nice that the device can be opened up a bit.

My partner has a 'Boox' that runs android, complete with apk side loading its basically an android tablet! Super cool so far - there's even a model with a color screen!

I slapped the Nextcloud app on there and she has been syncing her books between her phone and the Boox!

Edit= the brand name is called Boox! Autocorrect makes a fool of me yet again

I'd never heard of these, thanks! I been trying to find old Kindles for sale, but this looks like a much better choice.

ETA: they're also a Canadian company, win-win

Installing Koreader which can do a million things, but also playing around with terminal access, python, bash scripting, neofetch, usb-network, SSH. For older kindles: the screensaver hack was my first reason to ever jailbreak one.

According to that site you can downgrade the firmware (some people really disliked the various UI changes and the firmware is getting quite prescriptive)

You can also run your own homebrew apps so I found someone who installed KOReader which they claim is better experience than default reader especially for pdfs and also link better to personal cloud storage.

There's also ability to use locally stored Web Application Frameworks but I'm not 100% sure what the use case would be.

Read your own EPUB on KOReader, for free.

The main Reason I've done it is to install KOreader since it handles other formats, especially PDFs better than the stock Reader. Though you can also run your own homebrew apps as well like other people have pointed out. I personally don't bother though since Ereaders are usually best for a single purpose, reading ebooks on an eink display, and mediocre at best for other applications. The eink display tends to be its Achilles heel when it comes to anything that isn't reading ebooks, at least in my opinion.

I don't think there are many tangible benefits if all you want to do is read. You're likely using Calibre anyway for sideloading books and it converts everything to a compatible format automatically.

The only somewhat useful things the jailbreak allowed me to do is add custom fonts, custom screensavers, install KOReader as an alternative ebook viewer (although I rarely used it) and prevent updates because the interface became a lot worse after an update at some point.

My kindle could already handle everything the Kobo I was looking at could do, but was far cheaper than the Kobo due to a sale (and Amazon thinking I'm dumb enough to be locked into their system)

Literally using Calibre is enough to turn your Kindle into a piracy machine, so if you can get one cheap it's long been my recommendation for people