How to Jailbreak Your Kindle Touch for Future Customization

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So you’re a tweaker, and you’d like to do more with the Kindle Touch than Amazon allows, but the previous methods of jailbreaking Amazon’s e-readers don’t work anymore. Fortunately, a new exploit allows you to hack the first-generation Kindle Touch in three easy steps.

Here are the instructions, via The Digital Reader:

  1. Download the Kindle Touch jailbreak from Yifan Lu. It’s actually a special MP3 file designed to work some magic.
  2. Connect your Kindle Touch to a PC and drop the MP3 file into the e-reader’s music folder.
  3. Play the MP3 from the Kindle Touch’s “experimental” menu. The device will install an update and restart.

What can you do with a jailbroken Kindle Touch? Not much, at the moment, although you can already download a custom screensaver mod from Lu’s website. In the future, Lu expects developers to write apps for the device, tweak the interface and add support for additional file formats, such as ePUB. “This first jailbreak is really for these developers,” Lu writes. For everyone else, it’s just a preemptive move before the real modifications roll in.

If you’ve got a Kindle With Special Offers and are hoping to remove the ads, this hack may be the beginnings of a solution–as long as you can sleep with a guilty conscience–seeing how users previously figured out how to strip ads from earlier jailbroken Kindles. For that reason, if you have any interest in modifying the Kindle Touch, you might want to install this exploit before Amazon covers it up.

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