Posted on 02/19/2025 7:14:40 PM PST by ransomnote
It’s time to start backing up your purchased Kindle ebooks if you haven’t already. It looks like Amazon intends to remove the Download & Transfer via USB option from their website for Kindle ebooks as of February 26th.
Over on reddit, some people are saying they’ve been greeted by a new prompt when trying to download Kindle ebooks from Amazon’s website that says the following:
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.
So far all the reports seem to be for US accounts, but I’m still not seeing that message when I try to download ebooks from the Digital Content page at Amazon, but it didn’t stop me from downloading several dozen of my purchased ebooks to have on my computer just in case.
At this point it’s still unclear if this is only going to apply to certain Kindle models, or if Amazon is getting rid of D&T across the board for all Kindles and all accounts. They already did away with D&T on the newer Kindles that were released in 2024, so I guess we should’ve seen this coming.
Even if D&T goes away entirely, you should still be able to get your purchased ebooks off of older Kindles for backup and DRM removal, provided the Kindle is old enough to have ebooks downloaded in the older AZW3 format instead of the newer KFX format (it’s harder to remove DRM from KFX).
Correct. I dicked around with a Nook for a while, but went back to hardcovers. Still buy CDs and DVDs as well. Streaming is useless if you like the classics.
In the General/Chat forum, on a thread titled Download & Transfer for Kindle eBooks Going Away on February 26, P8riot wrote: Is “Kindle” still a thing?
Yes, but from the reading I'm doing I see that people 'jail break' them and load PDFs and books from other sources on them.
I can’t remember reading a book written in the last ten years.
I like to reread books that I haven’t read in three or four decades.
Last year I reread all of Raymond Chandler’s novels and his bio as well.
I found them for free on internetarchive dot org.
They are in PDF format which I like much better than Kindle.
This year I’m going to reread all of Albert Schweitzer’s theological works that I read in the Eighties.
If I wanted to read something recent, I’d renew my outdated library card.
Lots of ways to read books without checking out hard copies.
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