9 Mar 2026 [Permanent link]
I was recently waxing nostalgic for the e-reader I had around 15 years ago.
Wow, it's really been that long… Amazing. In any case, I missed e-ink
and decided I wanted one back in my life. Years ago, I'd had a Kindle 3
(which was retroactively renamed the "Kindle Keyboard" later by Amazon).
I remember even back then being weirded out by the idea that amazon could
remotely add and remove things from it, or enable or disable advertisements
on the so-called "lock screen" (it was possible for them to remove them after
the initial hardware purchase, no hacking required).
I don't think I had trusted Amazon to have my best interests at heart even then, so I didn't really want to get another kindle now. But looking around at my options, I was appalled to see that e-reader models with physical keyboards really don't exist anymore, and that even back then there were only a handful that did, some of which were Japan-only Sony models.
So the best option for me looked to be the same model I'd had all those years ago: the third generation kindle (Kindle 3). I considered a model 1 or 2 kindle as well, or a DX, but those all lack 802.11 (wi-fi), and the EDGE and 3G data services they relied on are no longer functional in the United States. Since one of the things I was fond of was browsing the web on its (somewhat limited) browser, that really only left the 3 as an option. I'm less than enthusiastic about getting "yet another touch screen tablet," so it was essentially my only reasonable choice.
Anyway, I re-obtained one a couple weeks ago. When I bought it, I was sure to look for one with a photo showing the "lock screen," so I knew it wasn't a model with the "kindle special offers" advertisements enabled. This was a program where you'd pay Amazon less money when the kindle was new, and you'd suffer through advertisements to save that money. I'd suffered through that for a couple days with my original one, and folded and paid the difference quickly. I am highly allergic to advertising.
It's basically just like I'd remembered. Like I'd never left. Except I'm savvier technically now than when I was 13 or 14 years old, the web browser doesn't work as well anymore due to forced HTTPS alongside forced newer TLS versions, some developer certificates have expired for some community-made software I used for it, and finally, on a more positive note, it's presently a whole lot cheaper than it used to be to get a Kindle 3! I guess a lot of people don't want or care about them.
It seems that not being a good "games machine" means the kindle 3 has escaped the wrath of video game collectors that have ruined the prices of other old computers that I love… at least for now.
Custom "lock screens" were something I never was brave enough to
try last time I owned one of these.
This is Nei, a character I like from Phantasy Star 2 for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis.
Last time I'd owned one, I vaguely remember going blindly through the jailbreaking steps, and then once or twice SSH'ing into it to look around. This time, armed with more knowledge, I felt a little safer going farther and installing some extra software to read epubs and other formats that aren't natively supported.
I had enough fun that I ordered a second kindle to document and occasionally photograph the tribulations involved. here's some problems I remembered, off the top of my head:
Side note: did you know it's apparently possible to install kindle 3 firmware on a kindle 2 (or maybe just the DX) with a little work? I just thought that was neat.
I just got a second Kindle 3 so that I could write up a nice ground-up description of the process of getting one in a comfy state for use. I also got it because this one had the official cover/case with a built-in light - not all the official covers had this light, but I had one "back in the day."
This Kindle showed a screen that doesn't appear in the filesystem dump I made, which makes me wonder if it's being done in the bootloader (or if it's just compressed or packed in some weird file. It's not in a .jar file at least).
It says:
…In reality, with this latest kindle 3, the charge took much longer than 30 minutes on a 1.2 amp USB power brick.
Initially, the charge indicator light did not come on at all. After about 10-30 minutes (I lost track), it started glowing amber. This is a good sign. Unplugging and re-plugging it at this point would make the light go out and then slowly fade back in. I think this means the battery was stone-cold dead.
After a while of this, the battery indicator started blinking. This isn't a good sign; I believe it means it's failing to charge the battery. If you see this, you may need to replace the battery. However, by unplugging and re-plugging it a few times, eventually leaving a 5 or 10 minute gap before plugging it back in, I was able to make the charge indicator stop blinking and start staying on steadily again. At this point, the charge light no longer faded in from black, but instantly popped on.
At this point, about an hour and a half had passed since initially plugging it in. The only reward for my patience so far was the charging indicator light coiming on, and then the behaviour changing a bit. And some nervousness, because of Amazon's 30 minute time estimate which I had utterly obliterated.
Also note that if possible, you really should charge it from a wall adapter rather than a PC; it is likely to move a bit faster this way. Although I think in my case it starts with trickle charging.
At this point I also had confirmation the power switch worked, as holding it down for 10-15 seconds would make the charge light turn off while plugged in. This can be hard to tell, but I had it popped open to expose the innards, so I could see it. Since it was still charging at this point, I wrote a little about opening it up.
The Kindle 3 isn't especially hard to open, but you really need to be careful with it and not try to force anything. The e-ink panel is fragile, and too much bending WILL break it. There are a bunch of retaining clip points around the perimeter of the back of the shell; popping these out with a tiny flat blade screwdriver (or, perhaps more ideally, a non-conductive plastic pick or spudger or plastic flosser or something) will eventually pop the back plastic off and reveal the innards.
There are two major kinds of the Kindle 3, although it's possible there are even more internationally. The first kind has just Wi-Fi/WLAN (802.11g) connectivity. The second kind has both Wi-Fi/WLAN (802.11g) and EDGE/3G WAN connectivity, which means in some countries that still broadcast in either EDGE or 3G formats you can still get cellular data.
The Wi-Fi only ones won't benefit from opening up, to my knowledge; only the 3G ones seem to guzzle down battery like it's limitless when there's no cellular reception.
Wow, that's a big battery. This is the board from a dead donor
Kindle I got for its screen.
Fun fact: I think this is the biggest battery any e-ink Kindle
got for many years.
Also, anyone need a 3G/EDGE WAN mini-PCIe card?
The United States, pinnacle of technological might as we are, has of course abandoned both of these. This renders the WAN functionality useless, and also seems to result in abnormally fast power consumption. My first Kindle 3 that I obtained this year (a 3G model), when fully charged, would last maybe at most 8-12 hours while "asleep" before dying. Some of that could be the age of the battery, but this still seems ridiculous and excessive. Popping it open and removing the mini PCI express WAN card (AnyDATA DTP-600W) and restarting it has led to much, much improved battery life. I can leave it suspended for multiple days and come back and still see it mostly charged, even with wireless left on (for Wi-Fi usage). I also removed the internal SIM card at the same time; a yellow thing, with "Oberthur" branding. Most 3G Kindles I've opened had these, but I've also seen one with a nondescript white SIM card.
I am a bit paranoid, so I put a little heat shrink tubing over the antenna connector for the removed WAN module. I don't expect it to short to anything, but I figured why not.
Note that if your kindle is on by this point you may have to fiddle with the power switch quite a bit to make it come back on. Holding for a long period of time and such. It can be hard to know when the kindle is actually *off* and not just in some sort of suspended mode.
Removing the mini PCIe and SIM cards made a massive improvement; I can leave wireless on for multiple days without the kindle dying now. Previously, it would go from fully charged to empty over the course of a single night. If you can be careful and relatively gentle opening it up, the battery life improvements are definitely worth the struggle of opening the shell if you're in an area where EDGE and 3G are gone (or never existed).
About two full hours after plugging it in, the Kindle came back to life and brought up the previous owner's home screen. I don't like snooping through others' private affairs, so I went straight to the settings page, from which I pressed "menu" again and went to "reset to factory defaults."
"Reset to Factory Defaults" will erase all saved media from the
kindle.
E-books from Amazon likely contain DRM, so I'd assert
there's not much point in trying to rescue them.
Maybe you can find a way to decrypt and keep them, though? That's
not something I'm very interested in.
…I then proceeded to break the kindle's screen opening it back up in a hurry to fix the metal contact for the official cover with the built-in light.
One week later, I had another dead kindle in the mail, this time one with a good screen that was unresponsive to the power switch and would not charge. I swapped the motherboard from the bad screened one onto this new kindle's screen and I was back in business.
The e-ink panel is unfortunately riveted with plastic heat stakes
to the front bezel of the kindle.
If you're replacing a screen, try to get one that's not too
scuffed up around the bezel. The keyboard is replaceable,
however.
Now properly charged, I was able to begin by updating the kindle to 3.4.3 (the latest version for the Kindle 3 as of now in 2026).
Kindle updates are not cumulative, in the sense that the update file for 3.4.3 won't contain all the patches necessary to get you there from 3.0. You need to chain the updates together. So if your kindle was on 3.0, you'd need to install first 3.1, then 3.3, then 3.4, then 3.4.2, and then finally 3.4.3. Amazon hosts all these updates, and now so do I (/dl/kindle/updates). As of right now, Amazon's instructions and download links are at https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GX3VVAQS4DYDE5KE. It's probably wisest to go through them; I have simply mirrored them because I don't know if I can expect those updates to stay there forever.
The update files vary based on if you have the wi-fi only version of the kindle or one of the versions with a cellular service connection, and also by where in the world your kindle was made for. Note that Amazon's link for upgrading a wi-fi only kindle from 3.4.1 to 3.4.2 appears to be the same as the 3.4 to 3.4.2 link, probably due to a copy-paste error. Editing the URL to directly access the update works to grab it, but every Kindle 3 I have nabbed on ebay has ended up being the 3G version, even when sold as wi-fi only, so I have not been able to test anything.
The update process is rather simple in theory. You take the update .bin file, mount the kindle over a micro USB cable (mini USB on kindle 1 and 2), and copy the .bin into the root of the kindle's "drive." Then you go to the settings menu from the home screen, hit menu again, and go to "Update your Kindle."
These updates should be able to be applied before or after the jailbreak, but you may have to re-apply the jailbreak between some updates. If it's not already jailbroken it simply makes more sense to do the official updates before jailbreaking it, at least for these early models that haven't been locked down as hard as newer ones have. I'm fairly certain the only thing the 3.4.3 update does is updating some amazon certificates, but I haven't independently extracted the update and verified this. It is necessary for KUAL and other unofficial "active content" to work in current year (2026), though.
If the update file is not in the root of the kindle, the "update your kindle" button may be grayed out.
You should of course be offline doing all of this.
After each update, the kindle will reboot, rather annoyingly. This is also true for hacks that install via "update" files. For chaining updates to get from an old firmware version to 3.4.3, this can also be frustrating.
Mobileread will be your friend. The wiki's Kindle Hacks Information page is a great starting point. Be ready for walls of text, however. It's unfortunate but it really is best if you read them carefully. The link for the "legacy" jailbreak forum post is the one you want to look at, since the Kindle 3 runs on the 3.x software versions.
"kindle-jailbreak-0.13.N.zip" is the file name you are
looking for. If the forum ever dies, I've mirrored the files from that
post and a couple others
here.
There are a bunch of files in that .zip, it's important you pick the
right one. You want the non-"3.0-to-3.2" version of the files most
likely, since you are running 3.4.3. The kindle 3 serial numbers
starting with "B006" are k3g, "B008" is k3w,
and "B00A" is k3gb. For my 3G kindle with B006 serial,
I therefore chose Update_jailbreak_0.13.N_k3g_install.bin
to copy to the root of my kindle's storage, and then install as an
"update" using the same method as installing 3.4.3.
There won't be any immediate signs of the jailbreak being installed, but installed it is. You're now good to start doing more in-depth stuff.
A good first thing to try might be installing the "usbnetworking"
package from that same forum thread, which will let you SSH (or telnet)
into the kindle over a USB cable and make a backup of the filesystem.
I used 'tar' to facilitate this backing up. I also used it as an
opportunity to grab the fonts the Kindle uses off of it for use on
my own PC and for installing in KOReader later. Definitely read the
README_FIRST.txt file inside the
"kindle-usbnetwork-0.57.N-k3" zip file! It will explain the steps.
For those who installed it blindly and are wondering what to do now,
you probably didn't read the README_FIRST file. But that's okay.
From the home screen, hit the 'Del' key, then in the search bar that
pops up, type ;debugOn (yes, with the semicolon) and hit
the enter/return key. The screen will flash but nothing else will
visibly happen. Then hit 'Del' again and type ~usbNetwork
(or on kindle 2.x firmware, possibly `usbNetwork instead).
Press enter/return. Then one last time, hit 'Del' and type
;debugOff if you aren't planning to exit usb networking
mode soon. Every time you type ~usbNetwork while in debug
mode, it will toggle between the off and on states. To go back to mass
storage mode, you'd enter ~usbNetwork again, preceded by
;debugOn if it's turned off.
If you're having trouble by the way, back in USB storage mode, you will be able to see a directory with a config file for setting up an ssh daemon to your liking, and I believe IP addresses as well.
if you don't have ifconfig, you should really just get it.
But I'm sure there must be a way to do it with the fancy newfangled ip command in Linux as well.
As a side note, the root of the "usb drive" when in mass storage mode
is under /mnt/base-us (on my kindle; maybe it's not
-us outside of the United States?).
You may now want to take a minute and add some things to your kindle's
/etc/hosts file to hamper its phoning home to Daddy Bezos.
You will first need to run mntroot rw as suggested in the
login message when opening a shell.
My Kindle's firmware seems to include both nano and vi, so for a lack of emacs I of course chose to use nano for this task (after backing up the original hosts file). In a shell session over USB, I added the following lines to the end of the file:
127.0.0.1 amazon.ca
127.0.0.1 amazon.cn
127.0.0.1 amazon.co.jp
127.0.0.1 amazon.com
127.0.0.1 amazon.com.au
127.0.0.1 amazon.com.br
127.0.0.1 amazon.com.mx
127.0.0.1 amazon.co.uk
127.0.0.1 amazon.de
127.0.0.1 amazon.es
127.0.0.1 amazon.eu
127.0.0.1 amazon.fr
127.0.0.1 amazon.in
127.0.0.1 amazon.it
127.0.0.1 amazon.ru
127.0.0.1 cde-g7g.amazon.com
127.0.0.1 det-g7g.amazon.com
127.0.0.1 det-ta-g7g.amazon.com
127.0.0.1 device-messaging-na.amazon.com
127.0.0.1 fints-g7g.amazon.com
127.0.0.1 firs-g7g.amazon.com
127.0.0.1 firs-ta-g7g.amazon.com
127.0.0.1 fras-g7g.amazon.com
127.0.0.1 images-amazon.com
127.0.0.1 kdk-ws.amazon.com
127.0.0.1 kindle.amazon.com
127.0.0.1 kindleatt1.amazon.com
127.0.0.1 kindle-time.amazon.com
127.0.0.1 ntp-g7g.amazon.com
127.0.0.1 todo-g7g.amazon.com
127.0.0.1 w.amazon.com
127.0.0.1 www.amazon.com
Since running mntroot ro failed to re-mount things
read-only, I then restarted the kindle to make it go back to read-only
more forcibly. This can be done by going into settings and then
choosing "restart" in the menu.
Amazon really wants you to register your kindle; I can't even do something as simple as setting the time unless it's registered… or thinks it is, anyway.
Another MobileRead thread details a method for faking kindle registration. For one that has been quarantined from amazon like mine, this is fine. Otherwise, it won't stick after it connects.
The e-mail is JeffsAJerk at kindle dot com, by the way.
Using the "update_reginfo" zip, edit the reginfo.ini file as described in the readme and then transfer it to the root of mass storage along with the appropriate update 'bin' file. Install the update, and then after the reboot your kindle should let you change the time and a few other little things. I tested this as still working in 3.4.3.
Now the fun part, getting KOReader. It's a way to read epubs and other media formats the kindle doesn't natively support normally. It's also an RSS reader and several other things.
There's still a couple basic dependencies we should satisfy before
KOReader will be of much use to us. The first is "KUAL," which stands for
Kindle Unified Application Launcher. This is going to be necessary to
actually run KOReader. KUAL in turn depends on "MKK," which stands for
Mobileread Kindlet Kit. The version from 2014 on the first page in
NiLuJe's
"Snapshots thread"
no longer works in 2026 due to an expired certificate. You still need
to install it (in my case, with the US 3G kindle 3, that'd be
Update_mkk-20141129-k3g-B006_install.bin), but then after
that you should also go to page 87
in that thread and install the updated developer certificates as yet
another update (for me,
Update-mkk-20250419-k3g-B006_keystore-install.bin).
Once you've rebooted two more times (wheee), we can copy KUAL itself.
This is just an azw2 file you put in the /documents/
directory under your kindle's USB "mass storage" mode root. For the
Kindle 3, you want version named 'KUAL-KDK-1.0.azw2.' For
most touch-based ones (besides kindle 4), you want KDK 2.0, but I don't
care about any of those. For ultramodern stuff that can't use
"Kindlets" anymore you'll need to use the update installation
functionality again to install a "Booklet," whatever that means.
Once you've tested that that works, time for KOReader. You should start here, if you ask me, and click through links as needed.
Once it's installed, you can copy fonts to /koreader/fonts
from the root of the kindle's mass storage area, and they will become
available for use in the program.
I copied the fonts from /usr/java/lib/fonts/ on the kindle
itself via the usbNetwork-based shell.
Another fun thing might be a terminal emulator, but I'll try that some other time. :)
To replace screensvaers, I think it would be possible to just copy them to the correct directory on the kindle filesystem through usbNetworking, but there's a nice patch that lets you just copy files to your mass storage area and restart the kindle to get them working, too.
kindle-ss-0.47.N-r18980.tar.xz on the
NiLuJe
Snapshots thread on MobileRead will get you the screenshot hack.
You'll install it like normal (as an update file), and then it will
reboot. Now, the important thing to remember is that you will need
to restart it a second time. After the first reboot, suspend likely
won't work at all. So go back to the settings screen and then open the
menu and go to "Restart." After this second reboot, you should be able
to see a placeholder screensaver/image when suspending the Kindle. To
add your own, put it in the newly created
/linkss/screensavers directory under the Kindle's USB mass
storage area. There's a guide here
on the MobileRead wiki if I've not been precise enough.
It will accept PNG images, but GIF's will perform faster (the image will appear faster after sliding the switch if you use the GIF format). Since the kindle is black and white, and GIF's can have up to 256 colours (per layer technically, but in practice per file), and a PNG normally stores an 8-bit grayscale image when being used in grayscale mode (256 unique values of brightness), a GIF should exhibit no quality loss compared to a grayscale PNG.
After copying the files you want to use (I suggest scaling them to
600x800 first; it'll work a lot better that way), you will need to
restart again. I think this hack works by using a System V init script
that launches at boot to copy the files from the
linkss/screensavers directory to the one the Kindle
normally stores its screensavers in, or else perhaps through bind
mounting over that directory. For changes to get picked up, that script
might need to trigger again. Or maybe the Kindle software itself just
only enumerates screensavers on boot (Shrug).
A successfully attempted rare and extremely dangerous 2x Kindle 3 hack combo.
Maybe I'll add more to this post later, but for now I'm at a good stopping point and I think I've summarized everything I had to do to get them working fully. Hope it helps someone a little. The MKK developer certificate expiration thing was especially devilish to figure out, coupled with it needing the latest firmware.
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