If you’re the owner of a Kindle, you may have seen the news that on May 20, Amazon is unilaterally ending support for a whole bunch of pre-2012 Kindle and Kindle Fire devices. If you own one of these devices, you’ll no longer be able to purchase new titles, download any new material, or reset/restore them—attempting to do the latter will lock you out of the device completely. (If you’re unsure whether your Kindle is on the chopping block, there’s a list of affected models you can consult.)
Understandably, this news went over like a lead balloon on the internet—many people own affected models that still work just fine, but will nevertheless be rendered pretty damn useless by Amazon’s embrace of forced obsolescence.
So, if you’ve got a Kindle that’s on the list, you might find yourself wondering what to do with an e-reader that was perfectly functional up until Amazon decided that it was high time for you to buy a new one. If you want to stick it to Jeff Bezos and keep using the device you own, you’ll probably want to consider jailbreaking it. It should be said that this risks bricking the device entirely, but, well, you don’t have much to lose at this point, do you? And a successful jailbreak will allow you to keep using it as an e-reader—one that’s perhaps less seamless in its operation than a vanilla Kindle, but also a whole lot more versatile.
But perhaps that all sounds far too sensible. If so, never fear—there’s always the… typewriter option? Yep, if you’ve dreamed of turning your Kindle into a DIY typewriter—and look, with nearly 8.3 billion people on this planet, someone has probably entertained this idea—then an Argentinian gentleman by the name of Roni Bandini has your back. In his Hackster profile, Bandini describes himself as a maker of “machines of an absurd nature and seditious purposes,” and his latest project involves turning a Kindle into a typewriter. It’s unclear whether this project was intended to coincide with the Kindle death wave, but either way, the timing is serendipitous.
Anyone seriously looking at pursuing this route can find all the information they need on the project’s Hackster page, but the tl;dr is that you jailbreak your Kindle to allow a couple of key pieces of software—the Kindle Unified Application Launcher (KUAL) and kterm (a simple GTK terminal)—to be sideloaded onto the device. Once this is done, you hook your Kindle up to a Raspberry Pi that is connected to a small thermal printer, just like the ones you see at the supermarket. Everything you type on the Kindle is buffered until you enter two line breaks, at which point the text is sent to the printer and printed.
Bandini’s setup uses the Kindle’s software keyboard, but anyone who’s actually suffered through that ordeal on older Kindles will probably also want to look at hooking up an external keyboard. The project also comes with files for 3D printing a snazzy little enclosure for the Kindle, printer, and Raspberry Pi.
Is this particularly useful? No. Is it fun? Yes. And as Bandini says in his statement on the project’s Hackster page, “Sometimes the value of a project is not in what it does, but in how far it pushes the boundaries of what a device was supposed to be.” This is true! And sometimes the value is also in keeping a perfectly usable device from going into e-waste because Jeff Bezos fancies another trip to space.
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