I took advantage of Amazon's recent Prime Day sale to buy a Fire HD 8
for $50.  I wanted it mostly for reading Kindle books.  That seemed
like a good deal.  How do they keep the price down?  Maybe by running
ads on the splash screen, controlling what software you can install,
contracting with Microsoft, stuff like that?

I would be interested in making it more usable, but I want the
existing Amazon Kindle stuff to keep working as before.  I have an old
Fire (that I bought from someone here) which has CyanogenMod, but the
Kindle Reader won't work.  Maybe that's an anomaly and the Kindle
Reader normally would work after the mod.  Is that true?

I'm not sure if the Fire HD 8 is crackable, yet, but it looks like I
can at least fix it up a bit:

Making Amazon’s 2017 Fire tablets more Googley (Play Store,
third-party launchers)
https://liliputing.com/2017/07/making-amazons-fire-hd-8-2017-googley-play-store-third-party-launchers.html


By the way, why 7/10 for Prime Day?  Ten isn't prime.  Why wasn't it
7/11/17?  ;-)

Mike