Amazon is turning 2 million old Kindles into bricks this May

If you own an older Kindle and ever factory reset it after May 20, 2026, you will never be able to read new books on it again. Amazon is cutting off support for Kindle models released in 2012 or earlier, according to The Guardian, and resetting them after the deadline soft-bricks the devices for good.

The models on the chopping block span the device's entire early history: the original Kindle from 2007, the DX, the Keyboard, the Touch, the 4th and 5th-generation Kindles, the first Paperwhite, and the first two generations of Fire tablets and Fire HD. Some of these devices have been supported for 14 to 18 years. After May 20, owners of affected e-readers can still finish whatever's saved locally, but the Kindle store goes dark: no new purchases, no borrowed titles, no fresh downloads.

The Restart Project, a Brixton-based electronics repair organization, estimates the cutoff could generate more than 624 tons of e-waste. The group's co-founder Ugo Vallauri called the "technology has come a long way" explanation Amazon offered "hardly a good reason for soft-bricking millions of still-functioning devices." Tech analyst Paolo Pescatore called the move defensible on security grounds, but users on The Verge accused Amazon of "causing waste at a large scale" and turning functional devices "into a paperweight."

About 2 million devices could be affected — roughly 3% of the e-reader's total install base. Amazon is offering active users a discount on upgrades, which is nice, but it raises the question of what "active users" means for people who still turn to a decade-old device precisely because it works perfectly and they don't need a new one.

Previously:

• I jailbroke my Kindle so you don't have to
• I removed the DRM from my Amazon Kindle ebooks