While cleaning in my office last week, I found my long-lost Kindle buried in a stack of art supplies. That was an odd place for it, but hooray! Then I discovered, to my dismay, that Amazon had “bricked it,” as they say in tech parlance. That is, Amazon has stopped supporting older Kindles such as mine, and now I can’t download anything new onto it, even though it still works perfectly well. Had I known in advance, I could have filled it to the gills with free classics. But I didn’t, and now it’s pretty much worthless.
Fortunately, I have my mother’s old Kindle, which is technically better than mine (it has a touchscreen and backlighting). It claims to have 27 GB of storage available, and if I don’t jam it full of free books before Amazon bricks it, too, then I’m an idiot who doesn’t learn from the past.
I will miss my old Kindle, though. Its beauty was in its simplicity. It was lightweight and easy to use, and it had many more years left in it, I’m sure. Such a shame.