I love my Kindle, and it’s easily my favorite piece of tech that I own. What I don’t love is Amazon’s horrendous ads that show up on the cover screen all the time. So I ripped those ugly ad pages out and replaced them with these beautiful custom wallpapers.

My Kindle now cycles through custom wallpapers

You can also use your personal photos and designs

First things first. I downloaded these Kindle optimized wallpapers from this website. You can set regular color images as cover screens for your Kindle too, but they’ll either look too dark or too washed out. If you want to use your own pictures, it’d be a good idea to edit them and convert them into grayscale first.

I’ve set the Kindle to cycle through a whole collection of screen savers. I downloaded a bunch of wallpapers, put them in a folder, and now whenever I turn the screen off, it randomly switches to one of those wallpapers. I can also set a single, static screensaver. But my favorite setting is to let the cover of whatever book I’m currently reading become the screensaver. That way, whenever I spot my Kindle lying around, the screen cover reminds me to continue the book I started. It makes the Kindle feel a little bit more like a paperback.

Amazon doesn’t let you change the Kindle screensaver, even if you pay to remove ads. The most you get is that Amazon lets you set the current book cover as the screensaver. If you don’t want that, the Kindle will default to its built-in wallpaper gallery. To actually make this work, I had to jailbreak my Kindle. Don’t worry, it’s not as scary as it sounds.

What it means to “jailbreak” a Kindle (and why should you bother)

It’s safe, and it liberates your Kindle from Amazon

I knew that Kindles could be jailbroken well before I even got my first Kindle. However, I was afraid to brick it or lose the warranty, so I never seriously considered it. That is, until the warranty ran out, and I learned that jailbreaks are reversible. To jailbreak a Kindle, you only need to modify its software with a computer (no need to touch a soldering iron or the e-reader’s boot system).

The chances of bricking it are incredibly low, and even if you do manage to brick it (meaning the software gets corrupted during the jailbreak), you can just reset it to factory settings to get it working again. With that in mind, I just went ahead and ran a jailbreak routine on my Kindle Paperwhite.

I started by checking my Kindle’s firmware version. It’ll be listed under the Device Info section in the Settings. There are four different kinds of jailbreaks that you can download and run, depending on the device firmware. Mine is an ad-supported Kindle, so I chose the “AdBreak” version. The rest of the jailbreaking process is pretty simple.

• 

  Storage

  16GB

  Screen Size

  6-inches

  Even in the budget department, the Amazon Kindle is a stellar value, from its light and compact design, to its adjustable front light and 6-inch display.

  
  

• 

  Brand

  Amazon

  Screen

  7-inch, 300 ppi, 16-level gray scale

  With a 7-inch display, high contrast, and sharp image quality, the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite will help you fall in love with eReaders. It even supports Bluetooth devices for setting aside the eReader and enjoying audiobooks through headphones or earbuds.

  
  

How I jailbroke my Kindle

It worked without a hitch

Download the Adbreak file, connect your Kindle to the computer, find the .assets folder (this folder is where those screensaver ads are saved), and copy it to your computer. The Adbreak archive contains a BAT file that can modify this folder. You just run the replace.bat file using a command in the terminal, wait for it to modify the folder, and put it back where you found it in the Kindle storage drive (delete the original).

Then tap the three dots on the Kindle library and select Special Offers. When you tap any of these saved screensaver ads, it’ll instantly start the jailbreaking process. The device will reboot and drop you into a jailbroken interface.

There are some post-jailbreak patches you can apply, like disabling ads, forced updates, and an app launcher called KUAL. Once that’s all done, it’s time to get KOReader on your Kindle. KOReader is an awesome open-source app that replaces the entire Amazon interface.

Among its many, many neat features, it also lets you set custom wallpapers. You just need to download the KOReader zip file and place it in the Kindle storage drive.

This is also where you can drop your custom wallpaper folder into the Kindle storage directory.

Customizing the screensaver

All the ways you can customize your screensaver with KOReader

Once all that is out of the way, launch KOReader by tapping its shortcut in the Kindle library. Inside KOReader, tap the gear icon and go to Screen > Sleep Screen > Wallpaper.

Here you’ll see three options:

• Show book cover on sleep screen
• Show custom image on sleep screen
• Show random image from folder on sleep screen.

The second option lets you set just one image, while the third option randomly cycles through random images in a folder. Tapping either option will enable the “Custom Images” button at the bottom. It’ll take you to the file picker where you can locate and select the custom wallpaper folder that you already loaded into storage.

You can also customize how the wallpaper appears on the lock screen—color fill, stretch, fit, or rotate. By default, it’ll show some text on the screensaver too, which you can disable under Settings > Sleep Screen > Sleep screen message.

If you don’t want a screen saver at all, you can disable it entirely and KOReader will just drop you directly into your book whenever you press the power button.

Custom wallpapers are just one of the many customizations KOReader offers

Setting custom screensavers is just one of the many amazing things you can do with a jailbroken Kindle. It truly feels like I’ve liberated my Kindle from Amazon’s limited, ad-riddled software.