PageDrop finds books on your phone and sends them over Wi-Fi to your old, jailbroken Kindle running KOReader. Free, open source, no cable, no Calibre, no permission.
Why
On May 20, 2026, every Kindle and Fire tablet released in 2012 or earlier lost the ability to buy, borrow or download Kindle Store content on the device. Books already on them stay. Sideloading still works. Perfectly good e-readers, some of them in drawers, some still in people's hands, can no longer get anything from the store on their own.
They still read fine. A jailbroken Kindle running KOReader is a fine reader for the rest of its life, but getting books onto it meant cables, desktop tools and shell commands. PageDrop turns that into one app on your phone. It was built and tested on a 2012 Kindle Paperwhite (firmware 5.6.1.1); see tested devices.
What it does
- Find books in the app. Search Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, free Internet Archive items and your own OPDS catalogs, or browse other book websites in PageDrop's built-in browser and capture downloads right there. Sources for other languages (Hindi and Urdu; Brazilian Portuguese open-access repositories) are grouped under Settings → Book sources → Languages & regions; the ones for your phone's region and languages start on.
- Send over Wi-Fi. Books land in both the Kindle home screen (
/mnt/us/documents) and KOReader's library (/mnt/us/Books).
- Make PDFs readable. PDF reflow unwraps broken lines and strips running headers and page numbers, so a text PDF reads like a book on a small screen. It needs PDFs that contain text; it does not OCR scanned pages. Keep scans as PDF.
- Fix the details. Title, author and cover are pulled from the file and open catalogs, then written into the book.
- Manage the Kindle. See what is on it, delete books, save copies back to your phone.
- Get your Kindle ready. A walkthrough that hands off to the Kindle Modding Wiki's jailbreak wizard.
- Extras. Screensavers, fonts, dictionaries, saved articles, and a read-only import of KOReader highlights and reading progress to your phone.
- Conversion server, on by default. When a book needs converting, PageDrop uploads it to PageDrop's conversion server (Calibre), whose cleanup job deletes it about 24 hours later. PageDrop asks before the first upload. One switch in Settings keeps everything on the phone, and if the server fails PageDrop converts on the phone instead. You can also self-host the server. Details: What leaves your phone.
Tested devices
PageDrop talks to KOReader over SSH, so any jailbroken Kindle that runs KOReader should work. Only one has actually been tested.
| Kindle | Firmware | Status |
|---|
| Kindle Paperwhite (1st gen, 2012) | 5.6.1.1 | Confirmed |
| Kindle Touch (2011) | | Untested |
| Kindle 4 (2011) | | Untested |
| Kindle Keyboard (2010) | | Untested |
| Later Kindles (2013 on) running KOReader | | Untested |
Tried it on something else? Open an issue or say so on Discord with the model and firmware, and it goes in the table as "Reported".
Screenshots
Getting started
You need an Android phone (8.0 or newer) and a Kindle that is jailbroken, running KOReader with its SSH server enabled. No jailbreak yet? PageDrop walks you through it.
Install
- F-Droid: f-droid.org/packages/app.pagedrop. Built from source and signed by F-Droid. Google Books lookups start switched off in this build.
- GitHub Releases: download the APK from the latest release. Each release is signed; see SECURITY.md to verify it. This build updates itself (Settings → Updates) after checking each download's checksum and signing key.
- Obtainium: add
https://github.com/spandan-kumar/PageDrop as an app source to get the GitHub releases with automatic updates.
The F-Droid and GitHub builds are signed with different keys, so one can't update over the other. To switch, uninstall first.
First run
- Not jailbroken yet? Open Get your Kindle ready. Its checklist takes you through the Kindle Modding Wiki's jailbreak wizard, KOReader and blocking updates.
- In KOReader, open Tools (cog) → Network → SSH server and switch it on. Keep the Kindle on the same Wi-Fi as your phone.
- In PageDrop, tap Find my Kindle, then search for a book and send it.
Privacy
No account to create, no analytics, no ads. Your phone talks to your Kindle over local Wi-Fi. It also contacts the book sources you search, Open Library and Google Books for book details, GitHub and SourceForge when you install fonts or dictionaries, GitHub once a day to look for updates (GitHub-release builds only; Settings can turn it off), and, unless you switch it off, PageDrop's conversion server. Websites you open in the built-in browser see you like any browser would. The full host-by-host list is in What leaves your phone.
Community
PageDrop is made by people who like old Kindles. Come say hi.
Building from source
You need JDK 21 and the Android SDK.
export ANDROID_HOME=/path/to/Android/sdk # or sdk.dir in local.properties
./gradlew assembleDebug
./gradlew testDebugUnitTest
To build without the conversion server, pass empty properties:
./gradlew assembleDebug -PPAGEDROP_SUPABASE_URL= -PPAGEDROP_SUPABASE_ANON_KEY=
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
