Amazon’s Kindles are great if all you’re interested in is reading books. The Kindle store has just about anything you’d want to read and if you’re willing to pay for something likeAudibleorKindle Unlimited, you may get access to more listening and reading material than you know what to do with. Outside choosing what you consume, though, you don’t have a lot of control over what happens on your e-reader. You can adjust font sizes, invert the display colors, and annotate to your heart’s content (theKindle Colorsoft and Kindle Scribemake these features even more fun), but the level of customization over how your Kindle looks or works beyond that is very limited. Amazon wants you to worry more about buying and reading books than using your Kindle as a tablet.
That changes once youjailbreak your Kindle. Digging into your e-readers software and making changes almost certainly violates its warranty, so it’s not a decision to be taken lightly, but if you’re willing to do the leg work, a jailbroken Kindle will give you a lot more control. It opens up new customization options, the ability to add whole new reader apps to your device, and, in general, just decide whether your Kindle gets updated or not. If you own a Kindle and all of that interests you, here’s the simplest way to go about jailbreaking your e-reader right now.
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How to jailbreak your Kindle
The vast majority of newer devices support a jailbreak that keeps things simple
Jailbreaking is not exactly simple, and one wrong over-the-air update can ruin everything if you’re not careful. Luckily, the current WinterBreak jailbreak for modern Kindles makes the process relatively approachable. If you have a6th-generation Kindle Paperwhiteor newer device, you should be covered by this jailbreak. to get started, you’ll need a Kindle, a USB cable that will let you connect to your computer, and the computer itself. WinterBreak only works if your Kindle is already registered to your Amazon account and is connected to Wi-Fi, so make sure you’ve taken care of that, too.
If you follow those steps, your Kindle is technically jailbroken, but it’s not permanent. Restarting your device or downloading any kind of update will require you to perform the jailbreak again. In order to avoid having to do that, you have to install a hotfix. The process of adding the hotfix is similar to the jailbreak. You’ll need your Kindle, a USB cable, and your computer.
Now that the hotfix is installed, you have a way to keep your Kindle’s jailbroken status. Anytime your Kindle receives an over-the-air update, just run the hotfix again. The final step in this whole process is to install the Kindle Unified Application Launcher (KUAL) and the MobileRead Package Installer (MPRI) so that you may add and run homebrew apps on your Kindle.
With both pieces of software installed, you’re ready to start using custom apps and making even more in-depth changes to your jailbroken Kindle.
Make your Kindle your own
Consider KOreader if you’re looking for a starting place
There’s a whole world of custom apps you can install on a jailbroken Kindle, but the one most people start with isKOreader, a custom reading app that gives you more control over how your digital books look and lets you read more file formats than the Kindle supports by default. KOreader is free to download and not all that hard to install once you’ve gone through the hoops of preparing your Kindle for homebrew apps.
You can download KOreader from its website and follow the instructions on the KOreader wiki to get it running on your jailbroken Kindle. If you don’t want to stop there, jailbroken Kindle owners have compiled awhole list of simple apps and software tweaksthat you can check out.
