Over the years we, as a family, have been moving our purchases away from Amazon, except in one single place: Kindle ebooks. For me it's that I'm incapable of reading physical books (but my kindle unlocked my reading), and with a Kindle, I was limited as to where I buy my books.
When I read that it was relatively easy to jailbreak all the Kindle models I used this as my opportunity to move to buying epub books and hopefully more of that money goes to the authors (in an ideal world…).
Here's how it's going so far. In short: not quite as well as I'd like.
Jailbreaking
I won't cover the process here, but it wasn't too difficult. You have to properly identify your model (which is tricky enough), and then carefully follow the step by step process. It's lots of reading, clicking, double checking and waiting. The Kindle needs to be connected to the computer doing the work, it's tedious but gives you more features.
Importantly (for me) was that the full original system is intact. The jailbreak process adds a "book" (app) called KUAL which is the doorway to the custom e-reader - specifically I installed KOReader (though I've no idea if there's other readers available!).
KOReader
This is the app that will read the epub format (and most other e-book formats). A little frustrating that the Amazon purchased books are read using the original Kindle reader (they're the AZW3 ebook format - which has Amazon's DRM protection).
The UI is…not entirely intuitive. I spent probably the course of a week messing around with different settings, losing where the menu options were, being unsure why there's two types of config panels and completely missing the pagination on the settings. Eventually I found that there's a "Menu Search" (in the right hand side hamburger menu in "Help").
There's some nice features for when the Kindle is turned off, besides having the book cover, I've got it set to show the cover, title, how long I've been reading it for and my current progress (search for "wallpaper"). I particularly like the "book map" feature (though, I can't say I visit often):
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