I’m glad I moved from Kindle to Kobo for ebooks when I did. And that I backed up my Kindle library. Because that’s about to get way harder.

An Update to Kindle

Downloading your Kindle books is pretty easy (so long as you don’t have the most recent Kindles). Just login to amazon.com/myk, select the book, click download & transfer via USB, and boom. You have a copy of that book. Ok, officially only the Kindle you selected can open it. But the file is pretty easy to crack with Calibre. However.

Starting February 26, 2025, the “Download & Transfer via USB” option will no longer be available. You can still send Kindle books to your Wi-Fi enabled devices by selecting the “Deliver or Remove from Device” option

• Amazon

Yeah, download & transfer via USB is going away. For all Kindles.

To say this is disappointing, is an understatement. As soon, any Kindle book you buy, will be locked to Kindle, and under amazon’s management. Anyone remember when they removed 1984 from Kindles? Yeah Amazon didn’t have a license to sell that copy. But under US law, that’s Amazon’s issue, not the people who bought it, from Amazon.

That being said, Amazon does have the ability to force update Kindle books. They did turn that off a long time ago (after some lawsuits), but with books locked to the Kindle, well, you see where I’m going. After all, we’ve always been at war with Eastasia, we’ve never been at war with Eurasia.

The Kobo User

A number of Kobo users online like to get preachy about not using the Kindle store. I’m not one of those, because I still use the Kindle store.

The reason I kept my old Kindle, was to be able to download any new Kindle book I bought, and put it on my Kobo. The Kindle store has been a fantastic supplement, for the Kobo store for me. But that’s going away.

Looking around online, ebooks.com has a pretty large library. The books are protected by DRM. But they use Adobe Digital Editions. A form of DRM where Adobe will give you the tool, to strip it, for free. Perfect!

Effort

Over all, this is not good. For both consumers, and book lovers as a whole. And I’m wondering if a lawsuit is going to pop up. Under the premise of “You sold me this ereader, stating I could download my books, and load them on over USB.”. That worked when Sony took away the ability to install Linux on the PS3.

Even if that does happen. What this move will do, is get hackers to put more effort into cracking the current Kindle DRM format, KFX. Which is a lot tougher than the format you download when doing a USB transfer, AZW3. Only time will tell.