Jailbreaking My Kindle

About a month ago a YouTube video titled It’s Time to Jailbreak Your Kindle. appeared on my feed, and I took interest by stashing it into my gigantic watch later playlist. With all the EPUB stuff I’ve been working on lately (including a web to EPUB extension in review!) I wanted to see what jailbreaking my Kindle would offer, particularly a Kindle as old as mine.

The go-to site is the Kindle Modding Wiki, which will guide you through jailbreaking every model of Kindle, installing homebrew, and installing the KOReader document viewer. (And even remove ads!)

I was confident I could jailbreak and install all the homebrew I wanted in half an hour, but a lot of the post jailbreak instructions are centered around the new models, and I hit several bumps that took me down the forum rabit hole. So if you have a Kindle 4 like mine, these pointers will be helpful for you!

1. Install MKK

   Normally the jailbreak will automatically install the Mobileread Kindlet Kit, but not for old Kindles. You can find the download in this thread under “KUAL & KUAL extensions”. Copy the correct file to your root folder and update your Kindle.

2. Do not install MRPI

   Old Kindles do not use MRPI to install extensions, so do not install MRPI. The ;log mrpi command will not work as a result, so don’t bother with it. Instead, you install extensions by putting their bin file in the root folder and updating your Kindle.

3. Do not install Update_KUALBooklet_*_install.bin

   This is only usuable if you use MRPI, and since we can’t use MRPI, this is useless. Instead, you want to copy KUAL-KDK-1.0.azw2 to your documents folder.

4. Install updated certificates

   Awkwardly, the certificates for KUAL expired this year, so it will not run. Go to this post and download the DevCerts zip file. Copy the correct file to your root folder and update your Kindle.

This tip is for all Kindles, but if you want to install custom screensavers on your Kindle, you need to get rid of the special offers screensavers. Kindle devs will not offer any help how to do this as they do not want to get on the bad side of Amazon. But I’m not a Kindle dev, am I?

So to remove ads, download the Disable ADs scriptlet and these two files. Extract all files to this directory K:/extensions/disable_ads/, then run the extension from KUAL.

Post Mortem#

Rather anti-climactically, I ended up not liking KOReader, so I’m just going to stick with the vanilla reader, even if it doesn’t support EPUBs. But I do love having custom screensavers on my Kindle!

I also learned that with a jailbroken Kindle I can run Python scripts that can turn it into a weather forecast display, among other cool things Maybe I’ll buy a cheap Kindle or two from eBay to play around with…