Back in 2008, I bought the first generation Kindle e-reader from Amazon. It was fun but somewhat awkward, with a keyboard of tiny buttons below the screen and big page turn buttons on the sides, plus an odd little scroll wheel controlling a little vertical cursor. The screen was the big appeal, requiring no power to maintain the on-screen text and being legible both indoors and outdoors.

Amazon went through various iterations of the device, reducing the complexity of its interface and making gradual improvements in the display. I have had eight of the devices over the past 18 years.

Standouts to me included my first Kindle with a touchscreen, the 2012 Paperwhite, although I didn’t mind page turn buttons. A disappointment was the 2019 Oasis: I came to hate its odd shape, with one side being much thicker.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I purchased a non-Amazon Boox Note Air with a 10.3″ e-ink screen. The big screen was nice, but it was simply too difficult to get books onto it.

Thankfully, my latest Kindle, a Paperwhite Signature Edition I purchased in 2024, is my favorite thus far. I especially like the Colorsoft Signature Edition Case I bought for it, which has a magnet that automatically turns the Kindle on when I open it. I even like its fabric cover so much that I made a picture of it the background wallpaper on my iPad.

Since January 2025, I’ve read on my Kindle an average of 15 days each month. I’ve read a Kindle book for the past 39 weeks in a row, while my longest recorded Kindle streak was 98 weeks from November 2018 to September 2020. So I’m still a huge fan of the technology.

Even though I now just use my 2024 Paperwhite and the Kindle apps on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac Mini, it still bothered me to read that Amazon plans to cut off access to the Kindle Store on Kindles released in 2012 and earlier. Granted, that is going back 14 years so it will only affect about 3% of current Kindle users, and one would imagine that the batteries in the affected devices are in pretty rough shape by now. The various Kindle books we have bought of course still remain available in the various Kindle apps and e-readers.

I was glad to see they are not actually bricking the devices. So long as the old Kindles are not deregistered or factory reset, they will still display whatever books are still loaded on them, which seems humane enough, and I expect most of the affected devices entered landfills or were recycled long ago. To have early versions enter forced obsolescence reinforces to me that I’ve been using the gizmos for almost two decades. Egad!