Ebooks can be a great alternative to traditional books. They do not weight anything, which means that you can carry around hundreds if not thousands of books effortlessly. They also come with extra features, like the ability to search books.
If you have bought ebooks in the past, you may know that you do not really own the books. Like most digital content, you get a license to use the book. This license can be revoked at any time and you do not have any say in the matter. If you are lucky, you get a refund. Besides outright removal, rightsholders may also update books at any time.
You are probably wondering what this has to do with Amazon. Well, Amazon is taking away a fundamental feature of its ebook store that existed for a long time: the ability to download your ebooks to your PC, Mac, and other devices that are not owned by Amazon.
Here is why that is bad. Currently, you have an option to download any ebook you bought from Amazon to a computer, say, a Windows PC. When you do that, you store the book in a place that Amazon has no control over. It cannot remove the book from the computer nor can it updated the book. Even if the book gets removed from Amazon’s ebook store, you retain that copy on your device.
This option is removed on February 26, 2025. Means, you only get the option to load ebooks onto Amazon Kindle devices. Amazon does have control over these. It can remove books from Kindle devices or push updates to the devices.
Another example of why that is bad for you. If you get locked out of your Amazon account, close it, or get banned by Amazon for whatever reason, you will lose access to all of the books that you bought.
So, if you own Kindle ebooks, you may want to download them before February 26 to a device that Amazon has no control over. You can do that by accessing the Content Library on Amazon’s website, selecting the “more actions” option, and then download & transfer via USB.
Note that you cannot do so anymore when you buy books after February 26th, as Amazon is removing it.
Now it is your turn. Do you buy digital content or prefer to buy physical content, if possible? Let us know in the comments.
Amozon, boosting piracy one greed driven descision at a time.
I heard that Amazon implementing feature to edit e-books remotely. So you bought some e-book a while ago and Amazon sells new version of this e-book now. Amazon can replace the e-book on your Kindle to a new version of it remotely.