Amazon Kindle 11 (2024)

The 11th generation of classic 6" e-readers from Amazon.

Kindle is probably the best-known e-reader with an E ink screen, although it was not the first. For example, Sony beat Amazon to the market with the launch of its PRS-500 reader a year earlier. The key to Kindle's success was its simplicity and its connection to Amazon's online bookstore. Current Kindle devices bear no resemblance to the first models in the series, as they have no buttons other than the sleep/wake button and are operated exclusively via the touchscreen.

The key feature of e-book readers, whether Kindle, PocketBook or Kobo, is their E ink screens, which consume record low amounts of energy and closely resemble paper in terms of sharpness, contrast and readability. It is this technology, compared to classic LCD displays, that allows for much more comfortable reading. Nowadays, almost all e-readers also offer backlighting, which makes reading easier without an additional light source. For years, E ink was associated exclusively with displaying shades of grey, but color variants are also appearing here and there.

Getting back to the Kindle itself - since it is a reader designed to be a "window" to the Amazon store, the home screen is filled with advertisements and shortcuts to categories, and the device itself constantly communicates with Amazon's servers and forces automatic updates. Moreover, Amazon also sells slightly cheaper Kindles with ads on the sleep screen and charges $20 to remove them. God bless America.
Although it is now possible to add books from other sources, files copied to Kindle are converted to a non-standard format and have DRM applied, which means they cannot be copied back to any other device. This is where the possibility of a so-called "jailbreak" comes in, provided you have a reader with an older version of the system that supports independence from Amazon. You can then block updates, set your own wallpapers on the lock screen, remove ads, install an alternative library management and ebook reader program called KOReader (which can almost completely replace the default dashboard) and even completely cut it off from communication with Amazon. If desired, one can also install applications created by the community. The Kindle then becomes a free device that one actually has control over, and the files copied to it remain in their original format.

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