I think there are a lot of people that are going to agree with me when I say that I absolutely hate being forced to sign up for something, some sort of registration or membership, especially if this involves a product that I already paid for. If it is as service that should cost money but I am getting it for free such as a VPN ok, I get it. But when it comes to an electronic device I shouldn't have to register a damn thing in order to have full functionality.
When I tried to use one of my favorite features on a Kindle on my new Paperwhite, which is holding your finger on a word to get the dictionary definition, my new device told me "this feature is available only to registered accounts."
src
Especially over here in Vietnam, where Amazon has basically zero presence, I do not want to register with Amazon. Do I have an Amazon account? Probably. Do I want to remind them that I am alive and that they should renew their attempt to advertise towards me? Absolutely not.
I could also create a dummy email and get through the registration like that but it's not about how easy it is, it is about how I don't think that I should ever be forced to register anything that I already paid for. Screw that, man!
So the process really isn't that dificult to accomplish and here is how you bypass the registration.
Plug your Kindle into your computer using the USB and it should auto detect and navigate to the documents folder
inside that folder there should already be a "dictionaries" folder. If there isn't one, create one. Then you simply need to put a dictionary of your choice in there. For me I don't really care but there are a ton of options out there such as Oxford, which is what I used.
If you have a kindle, this dictionary needs to be in .mobi form otherwise it will most likely not work. That's ok though because all of these are free and as far as I know legal to download free of charge. Here is a good source for a wider range of .mobi dictionary files and there are a ton of options for translating foreign words that might appear in books as well. I wouldn't say that getting an entire Italian dictionary loaded on your Kindle is terribly necessary because most commonly used Italian words will appear in the Oxford Dictionary anyway and if it doesn't the book you are reading in English will probably either translate it for you, or it is a part of the story that you are actually not supposed to know yet so don't spoil it for yourself, you idiot.
After you transfer these files to your Kindle, and they are normally extremely small sized to the point where you could easily put 100 of them on there and still have plenty of space left, you simply unplug. That's all there is to it.
Thankfully there is no other DRM that I am aware of although Amazon does try to trick you into giving you other reasons why you need to connect to the wifi and login for other reasons such as having access to wikipedia. For me, if I am reading I do not need to have a wiki about a word I am reading so they can sod right off with that noise.
The Amazon registration requirement doesn't ever pop up again when trying to define a word after this and even though I think that Amazon is an evil company, I am thankful that this particular trick has remained so easy to bypass. There really is nothing more to it than that.
So here is a tl/dr in case you are lazy like I am
- Plug up your kindle with USB
- navigate to "documents" it should be on the main screen
- find the folder named "dictionaries" and open it. If it is not yet there make one, be careful to spell dictionaries correctly
- download a .mobi dictionary file from any number of free sources such as this one
- put the dictionary file in that folder on the Kindle.
DONE.
That should be easy enough and I am happy that after all these years Amazon hasn't changed this policy. Good luck pulling this off on an Apple device.
Side loading stuff is a really powerful tool that a lot of people don't know about. Of course Amazon doesn't make it really well known either!
Spot-on analysis, the second-order effects of this topic are worth watching