Jailbreaking my Kindle

I recently decided to jailbreak my Kindle, which was easier than I’d thought it would be, and been having fun fiddling with the expanded capabilities.

For example, I can now read all my online manga directly from the eink device.
On the flipside, a lot of online manga are in full-colour now so those don’t really work that well on the Kindle. But for standard black and white manga, it’s amazing.

I also love the ebook reading options/settings available in KOReader.
I could customise actions to gestures and taps on the Kindle. For example, I can long press the bottom right corner of the screen to refresh the page (a great feature for manga readers), and a quick tap on the bottom left would toggle the frontlight on or off.
What it’s missing is some method to sync my reading progress between KOReader with some iOS app, for those occasions when I don’t have my Kindle on me.

And let’s not forget that with KOReader, I can set my Kindle’s sleep screen wallpaper to whatever I want now. I can even point it to a folder and have it rotate through a selection of wallpapers upon sleep.

As for how I transfer books to KOReader: all my ebooks are currently on Calibre running off my Synology NAS, so I can access my Calibre library either through Calibre’s Content Server, wireless device connection, or OPDS. This means I can:
1. push specific books from Calibre to my Kindle
2. connect my Kindle to Calibre and download books that way, or
3. tag books with a specific tag so they’d auto-download to my Kindle whenever it connects

As most of you have heard, Amazon has removed the ability for you to download the ebooks you’ve purchased, forcing you to read either through their Kindle app or Kindle device. Even though I’d predominantly read through the Kindle app, this move did not sit well with me. Which is what led me down this rabbit hole of jailbreaking and backing up all my Kindle ebooks.

If any of the above sounds enticing to you, I highly suggest giving jailbreaking a go.