Kindle Voyage and Basic Touch are Incompatible with Active Content

November 2, 2014 By Michael Kozlowski 9 Comments

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Kindle Active Content is a fancy term Amazon uses to describe the games and apps designed to run e-readers. In 2010 Amazon introduced a section of their Kindle Store for games such as Chess, Hangman, and Jewels. It was designed to give people different things to do, other than reading books and newspapers on their e-readers. The problem was that Amazon never really promoted it and many users did not even know this platform existed. With the advent of the new Kindle Voyage and Basic Touch, Amazon has officially suspended support for Active Content.

Kindle Active Content did not have a dedicated section in the bookstore that is accessible on the e-readers. Instead, users had to find the web version and make purchases to send right to their devices. Hardly any of the apps were free and ranged in price from .99 to $5.99. You have to remember that back in 2010 many people did not own tablets and the ones that were out had abysmal specs.

Amazon seems to have abandoned Active Content, the last new app to be added to the platform was back in 2012. Obviously with the rise of smartphones and tablets, there really isn’t a dire need anymore to run apps on an e-reader.

Michael Kozlowski

Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past ten years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and Verge.

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Pixilicious
Anyone know if this means that Kual — a launcher for jailbroken kindles which relies upon active content — *can’t* be made to run on the Voyage? That’s gonna be a deal-breaker for me and I’ll be returning it if this is the case.
Mike Ryder
Why do you jail-break a Kindle? What functionality do you gain when it’s jail-broken?
Kevin
I don’t think you need to jail break Kindle what for? Do you use kindle for game apps?
Kevin
Hello, I’m a student and use my Kindle for revision notes using Clippings.io. Was wondering if anyone had any other good site recommendations?
Emily Garfield
That kind of stinks but at least the Voyage has a lot of other great features like Page Press, 300ppi, etc. There’s actually a really good review of the Voyage on http://www.ereadercomparison.co/ that I think is worth looking at.
Logan
For people who like to jailbreak, it’s all about control, and being able to tweak the device to do just what you want it to. In the Kindle’s case, one example is being able to control the screensavers, to make it display the cover of the book you’re reading, for example. Other examples would be keyboard layout modifications, font selection, special games or apps, disable indexing, etc. Anything you want or don’t want, basically.
Logan
This did disappoint me somewhat, as I occasionally use the calculator app or note-taking app. Granted, that has been less and less frequent.
kkeil75
I found one game, WORDEX, which came out in 2013. Even for games that came out in 2012 and earlier, there are reviews still being left even today, November 3rd on Amazon, showing that the activie content items are still being bought, used and played. I have utility apps as well on the e-ink Kindles (e.g. calculators, stopwatch, notepad, etc.) and they are great.