What else can an old Kindle do? China Bookstore was closed for two years, and a USB cable revived it

tidying up the drawer, I found a Kindle Paperwhite. My wife bought the China version for 998 yuan in 2019 and had been lying in the drawer for over two years. When asked why she stopped reading, her explanation was quite representative of a group of people: bookstores are all closed, isn't this just a brick?

I plugged in the charger, the screen lit up, and there was still half a bar left. Not a single one of the dozens of books I downloaded years ago was missing from the bookshelf. I found another USB cable to plug into the computer, and two minutes later, her gaze changed—this machine was still far from the bricks.

Let me clarify one thing first: the bookstore is shutting down, not the machine in your hands

Kindle timeline for withdrawing from China needs to be examined. On June 30, 2023, e-book stores stopped selling new books, and on June 30, 2024, cloud downloads also stopped. Books that didn't get into the machine in time were truly gone, and customer service stopped simultaneously. After that, they couldn't buy, push, or sync with the cloud, and many people ended up putting the device away in a drawer at that point.

note, all the stoppages are cloud service . Not a single screw on the machine is missing: books downloaded locally can still be read as usual, USB transfers work as usual, the built-in browser opens as usual, and WiFi remains connected. For example, when a supermarket closes, you can still eat the vegetables stored in your fridge, but you can no longer buy groceries from that supermarket—you have to find a different place to buy and carry them home yourself.

The right way to

send books: one USB cable, ten books in one minute

plug the data cable into the computer, and the Kindle will appear in "My Computer," like a USB drive. Open the documents folder inside, drag the book files directly in, and it will pop up safely. Go back to the bookshelf, pull down to refresh, and the book will be lying there. On the first night, I dragged over 130 copies into my wife's machine, and it took less than ten minutes in total.

two small habits worth keeping. After copying, don't just pull the cable. A safe pop-up pops up in the bottom right corner before unplugging. It's the same as with a USB drive—if you unplug halfway through writing, the index can get messed up. When there are too many books, the bookshelf becomes a mess. On the machine, long-press the book title to create a "Favorites"—one for web novels, one for English books. The categories are purely local, and deleting books doesn't affect the folder structure.

format needs to be selected. AZW3, mobi, and txt are the three types that are directly dragged and recognized; epub is a Kindle that never supported direct USB dragging, so you need to convert the format (more on this in the next section); In theory, PDFs can be read, but on a 6-inch ink screen, the fonts are so small you have to squint your eyes. Don't expect it for journal articles. Her laptop is a Paperwhite 4 with 8GB of storage, and after the system takes up just over 6GB, so an AZW3 laptop only has two or three MB, which is more than enough to store two thousand books—much more worry-free than storing photos on a phone.

Where

Book Comes From: Calibre Software Tube Conversion and Management

free Calibre, install one on your computer, and convert epub to azw3 from it to it. Drag the book in, select it, right-click "Convert Books," format azw3, then right-click "Send to Device." Once the device is plugged in, go straight into the documents. Dozens of books lined up to circulate, and after hanging up for ten minutes, it was done.

there are two more convenient spots for it. One is the common old Chinese book titles with garbled text and missing covers, but in Calibre, you can fix them before reposting them, and check everything neatly on the bookshelf. Another issue is that when the library volume grows, Calibre's library becomes a catalog manager. If you want to replace a batch of books on the machine, delete and retransmit them, it's just a matter of the same line.

Free Book Sea: Experiment with WeChat Reading Browser

There is an "experimental browser" in the

Kindle, which many people buy and never open even once in five or six years. Now it's the most valuable entry point on this machine: enter r.qq.com in the browser's address bar, scan the QR code to log in with WeChat, and the WeChat Reading web version opens directly on the Momo screen.

has a large pool of free books. For the past two months, my wife has been reading web novels on Kindle before bed, setting the backlight to the lowest. Her eyes feel much more comfortable than staring at her phone, and a single charge lasts two or three weeks, so she's too lazy to look for a charger. Let me be clear: E-Ink screens have ghosting when flipping pages, and after flipping dozens of pages, the screen flashes and goes black after every scan. That's a physical feature, not a broken one; The web version can only be flipped through page by page, so swipe browsing is out of the question; And this one that requires internet connection; once WiFi is cut off, the sea of books disappears—it's exactly the opposite of the sample sweep at home when the robot vacuum is disconnected ( the local timing the vacuum disconnected article): one is all live locally, the other is all in the cloud.

the web version text is too small, use the built-in font size on the reading page to enlarge it by one or two levels. Don't use browser zoom, as zooming will stretch the page out of the screen and drag it back and forth. One more reminder: this browser is only suitable for reading text-driven web pages. Use it to browse sites like news portals with full screens of images. The e-ink screen flicking images frame by frame can make you anxious, but reading long texts is its main suit.

Advanced Gameplay: Daily Ink Screen Morning Report

The

Calibre also has a hidden "Capture News" feature, which has a large row of ready-made news sources. Checking off three or five of them can periodically capture the day's content, arrange it, and convert it into e-books. Plug in your Kindle before heading out in the morning, sync in two minutes, and your commute will be a cleanly formatted morning report—no strain on your eyes or the constant screen on.

has a trick to selecting sources: select text-based sources and transfer them clean on the ink screen; Sources with many images will be just gray blocks on the machine, with white taking up space. I subscribe to three sources, two pure text, and one tech type. Every morning, I gather a 20-30 minute portion, just enough for a subway ride.

the best part of this route is that it's fully local: capture is done on the computer, transfer via USB cable, and you don't touch any cloud services. Back then, the Kindle cloud bookstore was shut down, unable to shut down the software and data cables on your computer.

Jailbreak and Second-Hand: Think Carefully Before Moving on

there are also a batch of online features: weather clocks, digital photo frames, and reading apps on Android, all built on jailbreaks. My attitude is to advise against it: jailbreaking carries the risk of bricking, and if something goes wrong, no one will provide warranty service (there was no customer service to begin with); Plus, the refresh rate of an e-ink screen is naturally not suited for that kind of job. If you really want an electronic photo frame, an outdated old iPad is ten times more suitable for that job ( wrote about the reemployment of old tablets before).

to be honest about the reading experience, this machine has an underrated local feature: vocabulary books. While reading English books, you can find definitions by clicking on vocabulary. Words you look up automatically enter the machine's built-in vocabulary book. After saving a while, you flip through it again, and it's a vocabulary book you've generated yourself—words you've dug out from context, making memorization more efficient than a vocabulary list. If you use it as an English reader for your child and read the original version yourself, it's worth keeping for this point.

can't finish three books in a year, don't force them to stay. On Xianyu, the Paperwhite 4 goes for a range of over 200 to 400 yuan, and the condition is good, and the original case is a bit pricier. Before release, remember to reset to factory settings and wipe away any downloaded books and account traces on the machine—this machine holds your book list from all these years, more private than photos.

Here's a wrap-up

order: first charge it to see if the device still lights up and if the screen is scratched, then restore it to factory cleaning, send ten books you want to read for a week, keep them if you get into them, and if not, hang on Xianyu. Old phones at home can be converted into surveillance ( the old phone ), old speakers can connect to TVs ( old speaker ), old set-top boxes can be moved to the bedroom ( old set-top box ), old laptops can be installed with NAS ( old laptop ), This Kindle is probably the easiest to upgrade among them—just a USB cable.