A new Kindle jailbreak has been published, meaning you can free your Kindle from Amazon’s fetters, should you wish.
Named “Sanctuary”, probably a tongue-in-cheek reference to Amazon’s recent unpopular decisions, this jailbreak can be applied through an extremely quick and easy method.
The right to claim Sanctuary
Kindle owners haven’t had a great time of it in the last year.
There have been a number of terrible updates that all but broke Kindles, along with the constant back-and-forth about whether they were allowed to download their own book files onto their computers. Then came Amazon’s decision to cut a number of the oldest Kindles off from updates and the Kindle store, effectively rendering them useless.
So it’s no surprise a number of people want to see the back of Amazon on their beloved e-reader. Jailbreaking allows them to do exactly that.
Kindle jailbreaks tend not to have a very long lifespan, as Amazon tends to patch out the vulnerabilities that makes them possible. However, for the moment, you can jailbreak your Kindle by using it to visit a webpage.
You can find the full instructions on the Sanctuary page of the Kindle Modding wiki, and it’s very simple to use. Just navigate to the website it specifies using the Kindle’s built-in Chromium browser, and once some prerequisites are confirmed, you’ll be able to jailbreak your Kindle.
There are a few benefits to jailbreaking your Kindle. The first is being able to access the legendary Koreader, an exceptional ebook reading app. But you can then go on to download more software to your Kindle, stop any more Amazon updates from undoing your jailbreak, and generally make the Kindle a far more useful device.
Speaking personally for a moment, I’ve had a mixed bag from using jailbroken Kindles. In my experience, if your Kindle is already struggling to keep up, then jailbreaking isn’t likely to help it a lot.
But if it’s still running fine, and you’re interested in seeing what else it can do, then jailbreaking is a great idea.
It’s also a fantastic way to use those older Kindles which were cut off by Amazon, as jailbreaking can open them back up to new possibilities, and stop them from being just dumb reading devices with no access to new downloads.
As ever with jailbreaking, it can be a technical process, and you might find some of the post-jailbreak steps need you to learn new things. But it’s a fun thing to spend an afternoon doing, and it can bag you a device with all-new capabilities.
And hey, if it all goes wrong, you can just buy a new, better e-reader. Win-win.
