🚨EMERGENCY FOR AMAZON KINDLE USERS🚨

Amazon is changing its terms of service silently. Some people observed a banner message on their Amazon dashboards. That’s how we know about these incoming changes. You have until 26 February 2025 to take a backup of the ebooks you purchased to your device.

The goal is to encourage users to subscribe more. I believe this is partly due to the current state of product launches in the tech industry (yay subscription; boo ownership) and the unfortunate launch of Amazon Kindle Colorsoft.

Steps to download your purchased ebooks legally:

• Log into Amazon on your personal computer or laptop before 26 February 2025.

• Find Manage Content and Devices.

• Select your Device.

• View Purchases.

• Select Download and transfer via USB.

• Do this one by one (as a download all option is currently unavailable).

This affects you even if you don’t use the Kindle ereader. If you read via the Kindle app, you are going to face this issue as well. Follow the same steps but instead of Selecting device, go to Content and download your listed, purchased content.

When you buy ebooks, you activate the Digital Rights Management (DRM). It is the use of technology to control and manage access to copyrighted material.

You cannot, as per the terms of service, violate the DRM. If you copy/download/strip from the device’s storage, you are violating the DRM. It is legal if and only if you download via the dashboard of the registered Amazon account that made the purchase.

I’ve quit the Amazon ecosystem (over a year now). Maybe take this as a sign to consider other ereaders and ebook marketplaces.

:(

Kindle aspired to replace physical books with ebooks when it launched. This move is going to make readers of e-books consider owning physical books. The costs are almost similar. Maybe that is the silver lining.