Looking at my old, 17 year-old Kindle and how it works now...makes me really sad.
Now it opens to the novel I am was reading just before Amazon recertified the Kindle. As I recall, I was a third of the way through Laurence Dahnner's Ell Donsaii novel, Bioterror.

My Kindle now opens on the first page, Preprologue, of the novel and the type font is no longer the same as it was before and the size of the type is not 14 pts, but 5pts. Unreadable. The setting controls are now locked. I cannot change any of the setting for fonts, type size, cannot put in a bookmark to hold my place in the novel, or make highlights and notes about correcting typographical errors that the publisher (like Amazon, for example) might have let slip into the finished version of the novel. I also cannot save my place in the novel when I close the screen and shut down the Kindle.

I guess that makes my old Kindle device pretty much useless. A walking dead artifact; pretty much nonfunctionl, so to speak.

It makes me want to put it out of its misery--something I used to rail about when my dementia first started eating away at my vocabulary, my ability to do math, to read sentences, to talk. Believe it or not, that was back in 2008. By 2009, I was almost nonverbal and able to coverse mostly by answer "yes" or "no" questions. Then my psychiatrist got irritated when my latest neurologist told me that I "probably" suffered from a condition called 'psuedo-dementia'. I raised an eyebrow and replied, "So you're saying it's all in my head?" My wife, Donna, snapped at me, "Don't start, Charlie!" Two weeks later, when I was relating what the doctor has said to me, my psychiatrist laughed and said, "OH! He said it was all in your head, eh?!" and then he said,"Well, Charlie. We can do two things in response to that assessment. We can say, 'Maybe he's right. Or we say, "Maybe we should say, 'You are showing the symptoms of Early Onset Dementia. We don't know the exact form it is, but we can try treating the symptoms." He put me on Aracept, an Alzheimers drug which was originally designed to slow the formation of plaque in the back of the brain of Alzheimer patients. Aracept had been out for two or three years and it had been found that, in some Alzheimer patients, there was a marked improvement in the higher executive brain functions. Within three weeks I was feeling the speed of my thoughts increasing. Within the next two year I had recovered most of my vocabulary and my language (speaking) improved as well. I quit mixing up the tenses of verbs in my sentences. That Christmas, Donna got me a Kindle as my present.

And Doctor Sajjah helped me get back to where I could read again.

I don't want to go back to not reading books anymore.

So I guess I'll be researching alternative devices like the Nook. (I quit using the Nook because Barnes & Noble would not let me open my own Nook account; mainly because my wife already had a Barnes & Noble account and they wouldn't give me a separate one because we both lived at the same billing address). I know, it didn't make much sense to me, either.

So...wish me luck. I think I'm gonna need it.

charlie.