I didn’t realize that my Kindle Paperwhite was the original Paperwhite model from 2012! No wonder the battery is fading faster than it used to.
I considered getting a new one but it’s not really necessary as the old one otherwise works perfectly, and has hundreds of books on it. I came across a battery replacement tutorial from a place that sells replacement batteries and it seems easy enough to do.
Depending on where I buy it from it’s between one-quarter to one-third the cost of an entire new Kindle, which I really don’t need. The only real advantage of a new one is that it has a lot more storage capacity, but I can easily live with what I have.
Anyone done this? Given the ubiquity of Kindles I’m surprised there isn’t more discussion about this on teh Interwebs. Maybe because new Kindles are relatively cheap, but the waste just bothers me.
I haven’t replaced my Paperwhite battery yet (mine is a couple years younger than yours), but I’ve researched the subject a bit myself. There’s no way I would consider buying a new one as long as my existing Paperwhite continues to work. Frankly, I can’t believe how much Amazon wants for them now, especially when you can buy a similar, full-blown Android tablet (or 8" Fire) for much less.
An e-reader (especially a front-lit one) and a tablet are different technologies, and it may well be that an e-reader is significantly more expensive to make—anybody know for sure?
The number produced plays a role in cost here, esp. the quality e-ink screens. Far, far fewer of those are made and that keeps cost up.
I’ve stumbled across posts on how to where to get/how to replace batteries for my ereader (a Nook) without even trying and I’ll probably do that when the time comes.
For more info look into the XDA-Dev forum for you device.
Note that once the battery specs are IDed, you can get it anywhere you like. I usually find eBay to be the best. (Buying from someone with a huge number of sales and a ~99% satisfaction rating.)
Right, and I far prefer the Paperwhite’s screen/features. But it’s kind of silly that I can buy a Fire 8 (with offers) for $80 and a Paperwhite will cost me $150. My wife switched to a Fire a couple years ago and that’s all she uses for reading. I’ve tried, but I can’t do that myself.
I’ve been wondering the same thing about batteries and the life expectancy of my Kindle. I received my Kindle as a Christmas gift in 2012 (I think). It’s not the Paperwhite but one of the original Kindles. It has a keyboard and is 3G and not backlit. I also have a Fire which I love for watching Netflix or reading in bed. But I do most of my reading while I’m sitting outside and that is near impossible to do on a Fire. There is way too much glare. My original Kindle works perfectly for outside reading. The battery drains a lot faster these days and I’m worried for the day that the whole thing becomes obsolete.
Just wanted to say thanks for that – I much prefer written instructions like that to stupid YouTube videos. It also gives a couple of tips not present on the video I saw.
I ordered a new replacement battery which should arrive tomorrow, so I guess I’m committed to doing this. With, of course, the ever-present risk that I could destroy the Kindle due to outstanding klutziness! I may need a small amount of Bacardi brand liquid courage before I attempt this. Probably won’t be for a while, though, as I may as well get a few more charge cycles out of the old one.
If you can baby it along for another year or two, I would. They’re predicting that the first color e-ink ereaders will finally be out in less than two years.
You’re paying for the screen. The Paperwhite uses the E Ink screen, which is a unique technology and only manufactured by that one company. LCD screens (like the one in the Fire tablet) are significantly cheaper.
The cheapest variant of the Kindle Paperwhite is $130, and that’s about as cheap as E-Ink devices get. The Nook Glowlight with the same screen was $120 but I think that’s been discontinued.
As a side note regarding tablets vs e-ink, back in the day, I read my first ebooks on a Blackberry Playbook tablet, which was a high quality 7" tablet that I picked up when Blackberry discontinued them and started selling them at fire sale prices. I had no problem with it as an ereader and kind of wondered why anyone would want an e-ink reader. Of course that was before I actually used a Kindle for the first time!
Some of the differences are obvious – the Kindle and others of that ilk are smaller and much lighter than tablets. The front lighting of the Paperwhite is completely different from LCD backlighting (much easier on the eyes, especially in a dark room, and for all those reasons it’s fantastic for reading in bed). The more subtle thing that is harder to describe is that once I started using the Kindle frequently, I noticed that it was totally immersive, just like reading a book. It somehow just “feels” more like a book than an electronic device. And, in fact, I now find it preferable to a real book in most cases, because with a paper book I need to turn up the light over the bed, and the thing might be big and relatively heavy.
So this thread was inspired by the fact that I love my Kindle, and I’m glad I found a solution to its aging battery issue. In the worst case, if something terrible happens during my battery replacement adventure, I’m simply buying a new Kindle immediately! And yes, I also have a Fire HD 8 tablet, and I use that all the time, too, but almost never for reading books. It’s a completely different animal, IMHO, best suited to completely different purposes.
From my quick perusal of that article, it looks like they were trying to make something more like a general-purpose tablet using e-ink with color capabilities and ended up with a horrible implementation that was neither a good tablet nor a good e-reader. And color displays were probably not really ready for prime time back then, either. Not sure that says much about what future Kindles might look like. But I suspect that color might appear first in the high-end models and command quite a significant price premium.
The cheapest version of the Kindle right now is about $90 (in the US). (It’s not a Paperwhite, but they’ve started including a frontlight in even this most basic model.)
Yes, I seem to remember reading that that was their goal in making the Kindle: to make the reading experience as immersive and as much like reading an actual book as possible.
(And then, in those early Kindles, some people wrote reviews complaining that the screen didn’t light up like they expected it to. People somehow assumed that screens of electronic devices are supposed to glow.)
