This is absolutely what it is. The easiest way to strip drm from a kindle book was through this app. You download the file, strip the drm, done. I think newer versions of the app made it harder? But old versions were still supported.

The more locked down kindle mobile apps and kindle e-readers make it more difficult, but stripping the drm will always be possible.

I wonder if it'll actually work? At the moment you can pretty much go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis and download whatever.

I stopped doing Kindle purchases in the last few years because I sensed they were going in this direction. There are tons of vendors that will give you an epub of most titles. They often come with Adobe DRM but the UX of breaking that is even easier than how it used to be with Kindle.

For me it's the other way round - I used to buy from them when I could dedrm, and ensure that they can never pull this kind of bait and switch on me. Every ebook I've bought can be read on any device I own. I will not accept any other level of service.

Which is silly because you can easily just use OCR and screenshots to create DRM free versions of Kindle books.

> they're killing the old Kindles as well

Wait, what? What's the scope, and when does it happen?

Not necessarily? There was a post just a year ago on how somebody jailbroke the kindle books from the web UI.

I think the more plausible and likely explanations are:

1. Kindles take a beating when people actually use them instead of putting them in a drawer. Not many older kindles are still in circulation that are old + used. How good is a 14 year old lithium battery at best doing?

2. Added to the above, how is a 14 year old CPU doing when trying to support modern features and eBooks that now have metadata that did not exist at the time, such as fancier typesetting and color?

3. As for the Windows app, it's terrible. Horrible. Awful. Nobody liked it. Nobody uses it. It will not be missed.