A couple of weeks ago I successfuly installed WinterBreak on my Kindle (10th generation). This got my wondering if we had any old Kindles lying around to also jailbreak. Why? Well, I was wanting a second ereader to take on jobs when I’m having to wait around. One which it wouldn’t matter too much if I lost / damaged it. My partner had upgraded her old Kindle to the latest 7” model a year or so back. so I asked her to find the old one. She did, and it turned out to be a 2012 Paperwhite 1. She’d had a few problems with it on the stock firmware which was one reason for upgrading it. Sometimes (very rarely) it would turn itself off, skip pages etc. So I did a factory reset, and followed the WinterBreak guide, again, and half an hour later, KOReader was up and running.
I’m not going to do a tutorial on jailbreaking your Kindle as the WinterBreak documentation is “idiot proof.” But what I will say is that once you’ve used KOReader on a Kindle, it’s very hard to go back. For instance, you can forget about those proprietary AZW3 files and just use the industry standard EPUB format. This for me, is the main reason to jailbreak your device.
Another huge benefit is organising your books in folders:
And then setting the parent folder to home. Far better!
KOReader is highly configurable. Here’s a photo of the options menu for font / layout opitons:
From here you can alter margins, line spacing, kerning, contrast and more. There’s another menu at the top to configure everything else. KOReader also has excellent documentation in the form of their User Guide and you’re advised to at least skim through it.
Conclusion
The Paperwhite 1 is great with KOReader. I always launch in no framework mode and everything is responsive and quick. I was considering buying a Kobo Clara BW at £130, but while the PW1 is working, why waste the money? It’s got a built in light, 2GB of storage (~ 1.3GB useable). And, if something awful happens to it, I can treat myself to a Kobo. Or maybe, I’ll try and get another old, hackable Kindle…
