My poor old Kindle is about to be exiled to the wilds by Amazon, banished like some elderly hermit who has dared to outlive the fashions of the age. No more buying, no more downloading, no more anything. After years of loyal service, the little thing is being marched off into digital retirement and straight toward a landfill. And for what? Because it has a keyboard. A keyboard. The sheer audacity of functioning buttons in the year twenty twenty six. The horror.

And as if that were not enough to make a grown man sigh into his tea, my other Kindle, the Paperwhite, is also on the chopping block. Two perfectly good, perfectly functional devices, still holding charge, still doing their job every single day, being nudged toward the great electronic graveyard because someone in a boardroom has decided they are too old. Electronic wastage dressed up as progress, like putting a fancy hat on a donkey and insisting it is a racehorse.

All because it is apparently too expensive to update the software on older Kindles to handle the new book format Amazon is pushing in the name of stronger digital rights management. Stronger for whom, exactly? Certainly not for the reader. Do you not long for the days when buying a book meant the book actually belonged to you, rather than being rented from a distant corporate overlord who can revoke it at will?

I mean honestly, Amazon, if you are going to force me into an upgrade, can I at least stack the twenty percent discount from both devices and stroll off with a smug forty percent? It seems only fair at this point. 😄