
Critical Software Update for Kindle E-Readers - ingve
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=help_search_1-6?nodeId=201994710&qid=1458317761&sr=1-6&ie=UTF8
======
Sidnicious
The framing of this put a bad taste in my mouth. A few weeks ago, Amazon sent
out notifications that basically said "you must run this binary blob on your
device or you'll no longer be able to use it with our service" without
providing _any_ information about the content.

It reinforces the feeling that you don't buy Amazon devices — you buy the
privilege to use them on Amazon's terms.

~~~
andrewstuart2
It's pretty trivial to load up an epub file (or a few other formats, IIRC)
onto the device. It exposes itself as USB storage, so you just mount and copy
your files over. There aren't as many fancy features like position syncing,
but it's definitely a great piece of hardware even if you don't want to use
Amazon services.

~~~
phyalow
Even better is you can send PDF's/EPUB's etc to a special amazon email address
and it converts them for you and syncs them over wireless.

~~~
ne0phyte
And if you jailbreak your kindle you get SSH. I have my kindle mounted via
sftp so I don't even have to send anything to amazon just to have it sent back
to my device.

------
jtchang
I'm pretty surprised that the Kindle 1st Generation is from 2007. It's pretty
cool that Amazon is still supporting a product from 9 years ago. I would have
expected support to drop off or at least not issue any new updates period.

~~~
buddapalm
observe the free falling sales of ereaders in more recent years (any public
market research will do), and you'd understand that Amazons ebooks business
needs these old devices more and more.

~~~
mrob
With phones getting bigger there's less need for dedicated ereaders. I mostly
read on my phone, and I know other people who do too. The convenience of
having books in your pocket outweighs the small screen size. From a 2015
article on phone reading ( [http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rise-of-phone-
reading-143939...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rise-of-phone-
reading-1439398395) ):

"The number of people who read [e-books] primarily on phones has risen to 14%
in the first quarter of 2015 from 9% in 2012."

I can't find more recent statistics but I expect it's continuing to rise.
Convenience always beats quality, eg. MP3 vs CDs, early LCDs vs CRTs.

~~~
Retric
Heavy users may be more likely to use dedicated readers so % of total users is
less important than % of book sales.

------
SamReidHughes
No worries. As the page states, if you don't automatically update your device
by March 22, you can still do so _manually_. This is very easy -- connect via
USB cable and then drag and drop the update onto the device.

------
bradleybuda
Had an interesting experience with this - we haven't updated my wife's older
Kindle and Amazon mailed us a paper postcard warning about this. Losing the
ability to OTA update puts them in a tough situation...

------
0xCMP
Almost missed this. Hadn't used my kindle in a long time and then I turned it
back on. Apparently they keep a list of the people who recently used a kindle.
The moment I turned mine on it sent me emails about it.

~~~
dhimes
I never did see an email. I only found out by this thread. But I get so much
spam from Amazon (and now Amazon.uk, since I gifted an open source dev in the
UK from his wish list) that everything from them goes straight to junk. I even
communicated directly with Amazon.uk and asked them to remove me, but the
emails keep showing up.

------
firebones
Totally screwed. Battery completely dead on an older generation model I hadn't
used for some time. I can't even get the charging light to come on despite
trying all the tricks. Too late to get any kind of battery replacement and
still get the update.

Bricked by the cloud.

~~~
tzs
If it's a first generation, I have some tips for you, since I had the same
problem. If not, I have no help for you but I'll go ahead and describe what I
did anyway in case there are any first generation owners having the problem.

The first thing to check is that you actually _are_ trying to charge it. I had
completely forgotten that the first generation Kindle does _not_ charge via
the USB cable. It only charges via a small barrel jack. So of course when I
plugged it into a USB charger, the charging light did not come on.

The first generation has a removable battery, which looks like this:
[http://i.imgur.com/5Bv0EA3.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/5Bv0EA3.jpg)

I took it out and checked it out on my multimeter. It was down to 2.3 volts.
That's bad, and many chargers will not try to charge a lithium polymer battery
that has been discharged that far. I assumed that this was why mine was not
charging (I still thought at this point that it was supposed to charge via
USB).

I had done some reading on recovering over-discharged lithium polymer
batteries. It turns out there is quite a bit on the web about that, largely at
sites in the radio controlled model vehicle communities. Apparently, those
people have somewhat of a habit of accidentally running their batteries into
the ground (all puns intended).

The danger in trying to recharge an over-discharged battery seems to be that
the internal resistance goes up the more overly discharged the battery is.
Chargers will push current appropriate for a regular battery through them, and
the over-discharged battery will heat up much more than a regular battery
because of the increased resistance (and also produce gases at a higher rate).
The result is that you can cause the battery to burst into flames.

You can actually buy special pouches to put your lithium batteries in while
they are charging that are designed to contain lithium battery fires and
explosions...the very existence of these is scary [1] [2] [3].

Based on my reading, it seemed that as long as I kept the current low it would
be safe to try to recharge the battery. I kludged together something on a
breadboard to try this:
[http://i.imgur.com/UMW7EH2.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/UMW7EH2.jpg)

The power supply on the write is producing 3.3 volts. Normally you would
charge a lithium polymer at 4.3 volts, but my goal wasn't to fully charge the
thing. I just wanted to get its voltage up to where the Kindle would be
willing to charge it (at this point I still thought it charged via USB and so
was assuming the reason it would not charge was the battery being so low that
the kindle considered it unsafe to try).

The resistor was chosen so that (3.3v - Vbattery)/R was around 10 mA. The hope
was that this was sufficiently below the normal charging current (probably
around 150-300 mA) that even if the resistance was high it would not heat the
battery too much, and I intended to frequently feel the battery and stop if I
detected any heating. (The two leads going out of the picture go to the
multimeter, which is monitoring the current).

When I started this going, I got the current I expected, and detected no
heating of the battery. As I watched, the current started falling off, and the
battery continued showing no signs of heating. I took this as a sign that the
battery voltage was actually going up, and so the current was going down. I
cut power and measured the battery voltage, and it was indeed up to around 2.5
volts!

I switched out the resistor for one that would give about 50 mA, and started
charging again. The battery did not show any signs of heating, and the current
again started going down as the voltage came up.

I kept doing this, lowing the resistance (aiming now for around 60-70 mA) and
running until the current had fallen significantly, and then repeating, until
finally I was using no resistor.

I got the battery up to about 3.2 volts this way, and actually got a some
signs of life out of the Kindle. Still would not charge in the Kindle (and I
was still thinking it was supposed to charge through USB).

Since it was now well above 3.0 volts, and so in the range that should be
acceptable to most chargers, I switched over to a little USB-powered lipo
charger I got from Sparkfun:
[http://i.imgur.com/Rw0Mpzx.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/Rw0Mpzx.jpg)

I let that run a while, checking frequently to make sure the battery was not
heating. I'd stop on occasion to check the voltage, and it was going up. I let
it go up to around 3.7 or 3.8.

The Kindle would now boot and I could connect it to the computer via USB,
which means I had a means to install the update without relying on wifi. I
didn't want to use wifi yet because I wasn't sure what the battery capacity
was. I've read that over-discharging could reduce the capacity of the battery.

I noticed that the charge light did come on when the Kindle was plugged into a
computer while the Kindle was running, but I wasn't sure if it was actually
charging. This was when I happened to look in the manual for something, and
saw that for charging you have to use the barrel jack. I had _completely_
forgotten about that. I then searched a while and found the Kindle power
adaptor, plugged it in...and it charged!

So now I'm left now knowing if it would have actually been find back when it
was only 2.3 volts, if I had just found the charger and used it, or if it
would have refused to charge because the battery was over-dischargred and so
my breadboard kludge to inch up above 3.0 volts was necessary.

You may have noticed from the battery photo that it has 5 wires, when a single
cell lithium polymer battery only needs 2 wires. Taking one of the black wires
as reference, the other black wire and the white wire are at 0 volts, and the
two red wires were initially at 2.3 volts, and rose as I charged it. There is
no resistance between the two black wires or between the two red wires. There
is 11k ohms between the white wire and either black wire.

It is also possible to buy old Kindle batteries at reasonable prices, such as
this one for $5.32: [http://www.powerbookmedic.com/Amazon-Kindle-Battery-
Replacem...](http://www.powerbookmedic.com/Amazon-Kindle-Battery-Replacement
---1st-Generation-p-17831.html)

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Dynamite-Li-Po-Charge-Protection-
Small...](http://www.amazon.com/Dynamite-Li-Po-Charge-Protection-
Small/dp/B002JSV4LU)

[2]
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00T01LLP8](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00T01LLP8)

[3] [http://www.amazon.com/Safty-Guard-Charging-
Large-180mm/dp/B0...](http://www.amazon.com/Safty-Guard-Charging-
Large-180mm/dp/B00TRUIY3E)

~~~
firebones
Thanks to all!

------
noja
Expired cert?

~~~
nalllar
iirc, they're dropping support for SSLv3 which was used on older firmwares.

There's some discussion about this on the mobileread forums [0]. Thought that
was discussed, but can't find the post so I might not be remembering
correctly.

[0]:
[http://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=150](http://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=150)

------
jasperry
I wonder if this will undo a jailbreak? I mainly use CoolReader to read ePub
books on my trusty Kindle Keyboard, because of its better kerning and
hyphenation.

~~~
ikeboy
Generally jailbreaks can be saved across kindle updates, but you should update
to the latest version of the jailbreak and hotfix first. Some extensions might
require reinstalling.

Of course, if you have an old device, it's probably jail breakable even on the
newest supported version. Latest jailbreak is for 5.6.5, and it's been
confirmed that you can update to the latest version after jailbreaking and
keep it.

~~~
jasperry
Thanks for that info. It's been so long since I've done the jailbreak that I
barely remember the process.

~~~
ikeboy
Ask on mobileread, the devs are super friendly.

