FOSDEM 2025 Amazon’s Kindle e-readers just got a bit less useful, but help is at hand, from jailbreaking to making one of the devices into a monitor.
The latest change to the copy-protection measures in the Kindle range, which Amazon made on February 26, has fans of electronic books concerned. Specifically, the retailing giant removed the “Download & Transfer via USB” option from the Kindle e-book store. This is broadly comparable to the copy-protection on iPods and other iDevices: you are free to put your files onto the device, but not to copy those files off the device and onto your computer.
This doesn’t mean all Kindles are bricked. They still work fine, and if you don’t buy your e-books from Amazon itself, you can still use Calibre to manage your library. Scripts exist for making a local copy of your Kindle collection, such as Yihong’s Kindle download helper – although we’ve seen reports that this may now be blocked, at least in some regions.
Alternatively, WinterBreak appeared at the start of the year and supports jailbreaking even recent models of Kindle on the latest firmware.
Once the device is jailbroken, you can install your own reading or browsing software such as KOReader, allowing the Kindle to be used to read files in other formats. We did like one Hacker News commenter’s single-word summary of why to do it, though: “Folders.”
Modos à la mode
While the Reg FOSS desk was at FOSDEM last month, we bumped into Modos Tech‘s Alex Soto. Back in 2022, we wrote about his project to make more versatile e-ink displays. The project is still alive and in development, and he gave us a live demo.
Modos is currently crowd-funding the development kit for its e-ink display. The controller software, codenamed “Caster”, is FOSS and it’s available on Github. A small, inexpensive controller board connects a PC to an e-ink panel over USB, and offers a variety of display modes, depending on what’s more important at that moment – for instance, whether you need a high-contrast mono display, or grayscale, or fast update times at the expense of sharpness. He showed us the board, not merely controlling a display but also powering it off a single USB port. A button on the controller board changes display modes, and we saw it running ordinary GUI desktop software, as well as playing back video impressively smoothly. There’s a lot more info on the company’s Github.
The prototype e-ink laptop is on hold for now, but Modos has other plans too. It’s involved with the Patchouli project, which has financial backing from NLnet. This project is working on an e-ink graphics tablet, so that artists could sketch on a portable, daylight-readable, low-power device using an active stylus.
To be fair, with the jailbreaking options available, cannibalizing a Kindle to make a tiny monitor out of it probably isn’t the best use of one – unless you’ve already bricked it trying to jailbreak it, anyway.
Of course, there’s more to e-readers than Kindle, as well. While at FOSDEM we also saw someone jotting notes into an Onyx Boox Note e-reader; a new model launched recently. As well as this extra-large form-factor, it also has an unusually small one, in the form of the Boox Palma, a smartphone-sized e-reader.
Between new shapes and sizes, clever software, open third-party display controllers, and even color e-ink displays which are gradually creeping towards the mainstream, this technology’s glory days may be yet to come. ®
