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Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books

theverge.com

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Re: Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books

#51

Post by belter »

tene80i wrote: post #7
throwawaygmbno wrote: post #2

The simple solution is to stop buying eBooks from Amazon. Pirate all of your epubs and PDFs so you will always have an offline backup. If you enjoyed the book buy a hard copy for a friend, relative, book club, etc from a local book store. Amazon doesn't need your money anymore.

Your solution hurts authors more than Amazon. Just buy ebooks from somewhere else! Don’t be cheap and pretend it’s principled. I know you say buy a copy if you enjoyed it but that’s not really how commerce works and none of these authors agreed to offer you donationware.

Nowadays nobody writes books for money so yes, it hurts only Amazon.

Re: Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books

#52

Post by RedCardRef »

dvtkrlbs wrote: post #23
tejohnso wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just buy ebooks from somewhere else! Where can I buy ebooks (epub) that give me access to download the file so that I can copy it to my other devices and keep it on my own backups and organize it in my digital library the way I want to? I want a good selection of anime / manga / sci-fi, and a little bit of the typical best seller stuff.

I buy from Ebooks.com it comes with the adobe drm but it is super easy to strip using a calibre plugin

This! I did this when an relatively new but obscure book was needed for work.

Read it on my kindle after removing the DRM and sent it via amazon.com/sendtokindle

Re: Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books

#53

Post by paulcole »

jrm4 wrote: post #42
paulcole wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t the simpler solution to not care? I’d rather just pay to read books from Amazon right on my Kindle than go through the rigamarole of pirating all my epubs and PDFs. In 16 years of Kindle ownership I’ve never once been like dang I wish I had an offline backup of that.

Very simple. Maybe the simplest comment I've seen on this site.

Thank you. I try to not make things more complicated than they need to be.

Re: Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books

#54

Post by blakeburch »

dmd wrote: post #26
blakeburch wrote: post #6

This is... terrible news. This is primarily how I get books from the library. I found that if you keep the Kindle on Airplane mode and download + transfer them, they never expire. Nothing malicious. I just can't read books arbitrarily in a 21 day period.

This will not affect you at all. They're not stopping allowing you to transfer books to your kindle over USB. They're stopping letting you download book files from Amazon .

From what the article says, that's doesn't appear to be true.

In order to download and transfer Kindle books from the Library, I have to first add them to "My Content" on Amazon, then from the Amazon interface click "Download & Transfer via USB". That's the only way to access the AZW3 files that get moved over to the Kindle.

Re: Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books

#55

Post by blakeburch »

amazingamazing wrote: post #33
blakeburch wrote: post #6

This is... terrible news. This is primarily how I get books from the library. I found that if you keep the Kindle on Airplane mode and download + transfer them, they never expire. Nothing malicious. I just can't read books arbitrarily in a 21 day period.

This has nothing to do what your use case since you get the books from the library.

From what the article says, that's doesn't appear to be true.

In order to download and transfer Kindle books from the Library, I have to first add them to "My Content" on Amazon, then from the Amazon interface click "Download & Transfer via USB". That's the only way to access the AZW3 files that get moved over to the Kindle.

Re: Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books

#56

Post by EA-3167 »

nehal3m wrote: post #39
EA-3167 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've switched from Amazon to Kobo (in terms of a store, I don't use either's devices). I tested last night and I was able to copy epubs purchased from Kobo wherever I wanted. They have all of what you just described. Like you, I insist on having the ability to archive and backup my media, and the second I learned that Amazon was removing that ability I was done with them. Also just to echo what others have said, I'm…

Some of the books on the kobo store come with DRM, but if that’s the case it says so in the description.

That's true, but it's also the Adobe DRM which can be trivially stripped using Calibre, so it's not a big deal IMO.

Re: Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books

#57

Post by Minor49er »

tene80i wrote: post #7
throwawaygmbno wrote: post #2

The simple solution is to stop buying eBooks from Amazon. Pirate all of your epubs and PDFs so you will always have an offline backup. If you enjoyed the book buy a hard copy for a friend, relative, book club, etc from a local book store. Amazon doesn't need your money anymore.

Your solution hurts authors more than Amazon. Just buy ebooks from somewhere else! Don’t be cheap and pretend it’s principled. I know you say buy a copy if you enjoyed it but that’s not really how commerce works and none of these authors agreed to offer you donationware.

Authors still write books in a world where digital copying is so commonplace that people talk and trade openly with zero fear of repercussion. Trading material helps it to live longer and get it into more hands, giving it more significance, meaning that it has a chance of reaching an audience that has a portion of people who will seek out a means of paying for it, directly or otherwise (eg supporting some other work from the author, or even paying for it directly like when Radiohead leaked Hail to the Thief for free but fans still clamored to pay for it which also help to underline the fact that one copy does not equal one lost sale)

Digital piracy has been around for decades, naturally. The primary thing that computers do is copy data (you download a book, that's a copy on your hard drive. You read it, you've now copied it to RAM and to your graphical display. You sync it to another device, that's another several copies, etc). It will never be stopped

Re: Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books

#58

Post by amazingamazing »

blakeburch wrote: post #55
amazingamazing wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do what your use case since you get the books from the library.

From what the article says, that's doesn't appear to be true. In order to download and transfer Kindle books from the Library, I have to first add them to "My Content" on Amazon, then from the Amazon interface click "Download & Transfer via USB". That's the only way to access the AZW3 files that get moved over to the Kindle.

Are you talking about the amazon library or an actual library that lends you ebooks? I'm assuming the latter, in which case you just plug in and transfer.

Re: Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books

#59

Post by dmd »

blakeburch wrote: post #54
dmd wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will not affect you at all. They're not stopping allowing you to transfer books to your kindle over USB. They're stopping letting you download book files from Amazon .

From what the article says, that's doesn't appear to be true. In order to download and transfer Kindle books from the Library, I have to first add them to "My Content" on Amazon, then from the Amazon interface click "Download & Transfer via USB". That's the only way to access the AZW3 files that get moved over to the Kindle.

Oh, sorry. Didn’t realize you meant your kindle library. I thought you were talking about borrowing ebooks from your public library.

Re: Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books

#60

Post by giaour »

tejohnso wrote: post #13
tene80i wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your solution hurts authors more than Amazon. Just buy ebooks from somewhere else! Don’t be cheap and pretend it’s principled. I know you say buy a copy if you enjoyed it but that’s not really how commerce works and none of these authors agreed to offer you donationware.

> Just buy ebooks from somewhere else! Where can I buy ebooks (epub) that give me access to download the file so that I can copy it to my other devices and keep it on my own backups and organize it in my digital library the way I want to? I want a good selection of anime / manga / sci-fi, and a little bit of the typical best seller stuff.

For books from small and specialty presses, I like to buy the ebook from the publisher because they'll often sell you a copy without DRM. Mind you, this has been true for tech presses and small companies but not for university presses and imprints attached to big publishing houses.

Humble Bundles (if you get lucky and find a good one) are also usually just DRM-free files in a zip archive. I've seen more sci-fi bundles lately (e.g., they had bundles of the complete works of John Scalzi, V.E. Schwab, and Ursula K LeGuin last year), and I think they usually have some anime bundle on offer.

Kobo is also a pretty complete bookstore, and they tend to match a lot of the "1.99 ebook today only!" sales that Amazon runs. I do most of my reading on one of their devices becaus you can sync PDFs/ePubs (via a USB cable or Dropbox) and log in directly to Pocket (for web pages) and OverDrive (for library books).

I saw Bookshop.org also sells ebooks, but their marketing copy ("read right in your web browser, or download our iPhone or Android apps for the full reading experience") makes it sound like they built a closed platform and don't sell files.

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