[HN Gopher] Amazon ends kindle ebooks "Download and Transfer via...
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Amazon ends kindle ebooks "Download and Transfer via USB"
Author : m463
Score : 76 points
Date : 2025-02-13 21:39 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (goodereader.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (goodereader.com)
| scblock wrote:
| "Why is Amazon doing this? It's a feature not many people use and
| those who do, commit e-book piracy."
|
| What one earth is wrong with the people who write this kind of
| garbage?
| CursedSilicon wrote:
| Why be objective when you can insert your own snarky commentary
| and simp for fucking Amazon of all places?
| bhaney wrote:
| > What on earth is wrong with the people who write this kind of
| garbage?
|
| They're employees of scummy companies that also happen to exist
| largely to sell Amazon products. This site (goodereader) sells
| a lot of Kindles in their store, and you don't have to do much
| googling to see how former customers feel about them. Of course
| they're Amazon lackeys.
| notatoad wrote:
| just to be clear, this does not affect the people who actually
| pirate ebooks, you can still download mobi files all over the
| internet and transfer them onto your kindle. it's only an
| impediment for people who legally purchase kindle ebooks that
| have DRM intact and want to transfer them to the device via
| USB.
|
| it's not targeting the ebook pirates who knows about libgen,
| it's just meant to annoy the people who borrow an ebook from
| their library and want to keep it an extra couple days by
| turning off their kindle's wifi. that's what they mean by
| "piracy".
| Macha wrote:
| Also people that legally purchase them and want to use them
| with non-kindle readers and applications.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| you can still download mobi files all over the internet and
| transfer them onto your kindle
|
| Right, but where did the first copy of each of those files
| originate?
| whatever1 wrote:
| Oh yeah! Hadn't thought of this. OCR the kindle screen
| while flipping pages?
| amazingamazing wrote:
| Why do you think something is wrong with them?
|
| The part about it not being something many use is probably true
| in percentage terms. The part about it being used for piracy is
| hard to prove. Piracy in this context would likely be giving it
| to others - I personally think it's unlikely.
| scblock wrote:
| I purchase ebooks from Amazon, and I remove DRM from them
| immediately. I'm not pirating, I'm buying, but this asshole
| is saying otherwise.
|
| DRM is unacceptable. If I can't remove it I won't buy at all.
| exe34 wrote:
| same. I've bought it. I'm reading it on my kindle, phone,
| Linux laptop, etc and nobody's going to stop me.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| It's ironic, but the child post here says:
|
| > same. I've bought it. I'm reading it on my kindle, phone,
| Linux laptop, etc and nobody's going to stop me.
|
| Technically piracy (not that I particularly care).
| Technically in the USA removing DRM is also piracy, so I
| guess they're right? Again, don't actually care and would
| do the same, but I find your response ironic.
|
| The law is pretty complicated though. I think if it's for
| yourself it's fair use, but 17 U.S. Code SS 1201 says
| otherwise. I'm not a lawyer, sad.
| the_af wrote:
| I disagree. This is not "technically piracy".
|
| Piracy is ill-defined and so it's hard to say what is or
| isn't for such an informal term, but even if it weren't:
| removing the DRM of stuff you purchased legally, and for
| your own use, is not "piracy" by any reasonable use of
| the word.
|
| It might be _illegal_ , but it's not piracy.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| what's your definition of piracy?
| whatever1 wrote:
| I think copyright violation.If I sell you my painting I
| might not give you the right to copy it.
|
| It even happens with animals of rare breed. They neuter
| them before sale.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| back in the 90s this woulda been referred to as cracking.
| troyvit wrote:
| Probably at Amazon HQ there lives a shitty PowerPoint,
| and one of that PowerPoint's slides says, "What to do
| with pirates who don't believe they are pirates". And
| this solution was in the speaker notes.
| StevenNunez wrote:
| This. I can only open kindle books on the kindle app. Other
| apps allow for pen markup and better reading experiences
| like text to speech... I can't see myself buying any more
| books from the kindle store.
| cogman10 wrote:
| "Nobody uses this except for those that do, and those people
| are filthy dirty rotten thieves who are garbage." Or, you know,
| people who want to backup their purchased media precisely
| because of this sort of move.
| er4hn wrote:
| But not the people that use Calibre, fta: You can continue to
| use Calibre to send Kindle books to your Kindle
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Earlier: _Amazon is closing a Kindle loophole that makes it easy
| to remove DRM_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43039924
| m463 wrote:
| > Dear Customer,
|
| >
|
| > Thank you for being a loyal Kindle customer. We wanted to let
| you know about changes to the Download & Transfer via USB feature
| in the Manage Your Content and Devices page. Starting February
| 26, 2025, while you can continue reading books previously
| downloaded on your Kindle device, you will not be able to
| download and transfer via USB any Kindle content. We apologize
| for any inconvenience this change may cause.
|
| >
|
| > You can, of course, continue to read Kindle content using
| Kindle for Web, or the free Kindle apps for Android, iOS, Mac,
| and PC as well as supported Kindle devices with WiFi capability.
| You may be eligible for a discount on the purchase of a new
| device, please visit http://amazon.com/tradein for more
| information.
|
| >
|
| > If you have any questions or require assistance, please visit
| http://www.amazon.com/kindlesupport.
|
| >
|
| > Best Regards,
|
| >
|
| > The Kindle Team
| hiatus wrote:
| Would keeping the device in airplane mode prevent this?
|
| edit: commented before rtfa
|
| > Here are some essential facts to know.
|
| > You can continue to use Calibre to send Kindle books to your
| Kindle
|
| > Send to Kindle will continue to work
|
| > You can continue to sideload e-books on your Kindle via USB
| cable
| tripplyons wrote:
| Presumably, yes. I will at least try to do so.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I keep my Kindles in airplane mode most of the time because
| otherwise Amazon tries to change the covers on all the books
| you've sideloaded.
| adhamsalama wrote:
| And deletes them too.
| delecti wrote:
| No. They're removing the ability to download the books from
| their website in a format which can be manually put onto the
| device.
|
| If you get ebooks from places other than them, you can still
| manually transfer them to a Kindle, regardless of whether the
| Kindle is online or not.
| ellisv wrote:
| They're removing the button to download the book to your
| computer from their website.
|
| If you buy a Kindle book, or borrow a digital book from your
| library, you could then use the "Download and Transfer with
| USB" button to get the file on your device. You'd then use
| Calibre and the DeDRM plugin to remove the DRM.
| tripplyons wrote:
| Why does it say "You can continue to sideload e-books on your
| Kindle via USB cable" at the bottom? Isn't that contradictory?
| nemomarx wrote:
| you can't download Kindle ebooks, but I suppose you could get
| them elsewhere?
| tripplyons wrote:
| Let's say I downloaded a paper on my laptop and want to
| transfer it to my Kindle. Would I need a WiFi connection to
| be able to transfer it?
| delecti wrote:
| No, as long as it's in a compatible format. They're not
| removing the ability to put files onto the Kindle, just
| removing the ability to download files _from them_ , for
| the purpose of being put onto a Kindle.
| ellisv wrote:
| No
| westondeboer wrote:
| also "Send to Kindle will continue to work" which works over
| wifi https://www.amazon.com/sendtokindle
| tripplyons wrote:
| I understand that part. I was wondering specifically about
| the USB functionality because there was that sentence that
| made it unclear.
| Zanni wrote:
| If you have ebooks from other sources, like Project Gutenberg,
| you can still load them on your Kindle.
| tripplyons wrote:
| Got it. In that case, what is different about the feature
| being disabled?
| goosedragons wrote:
| Download and transfer is for books bought off Amazon. A way
| to get books on if you didn't have cellular or Wifi.
| tripplyons wrote:
| I see. So I will not have to worry about this if all of
| my Amazon purchased books are on my device.
| vel0city wrote:
| The only thing to worry about is if you use the existing
| process where you buy a book from the Amazon store,
| download it locally to your computer, then copy the
| Amazon DRM'd ebook from your computer to your Kindle by
| USB. The step to download the book from the Kindle store
| to your computer will be going away, Kindle books from
| the Kindle store will have to be directly delivered to
| Kindle devices through either WiFi or cellular.
|
| Being able to generally copy books to your Kindle by USB
| will not be going away. Books on your Kindle will not be
| going away, other than the historical reasons why Amazon
| pulls ebooks from people's devices (but that's not
| changing at all here). If you have a collection of DRM-
| free ebooks you can continue to use those and side load
| those by USB.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| There's that word again! "sideload"
| barbazoo wrote:
| > The "download and transfer option" is located on the Amazon
| website when logged in. To get there, hover over the text to the
| right of the search bar that says "Hello, [Your Name] Account &
| Lists", select "Orders" from the menu that appears, then select
| "Digital Orders" from the "Your Orders" page that appears after
| selecting. You'll see a list of Digital Orders you've placed,
| including books. Click "Manage Content and Devices" next to one
| of the items, and a "Digital Content" page will appear. After
| clicking "More Actions," you'll see a list of actions, including
| "Download & Transfer via USB". This is the option that is going
| away.
|
| Will this affect people downloading books that are already on the
| Kindle using tools like Calibre?
| apetresc wrote:
| No, this isn't a change to the Kindle itself at all. It's the
| removal of an option from the Kindle Content section of the
| Amazon website.
| drtournier wrote:
| <quietly turns airplane mode on for good>
| mrdevlar wrote:
| This is exactly why I didn't buy an Amazon product as an eink
| reader.
|
| I want control over the things I own, I don't want them to exist
| locked up in a walled system where corporations can yank my
| ownership of something I paid for whenever they feel so inclined.
|
| The people who were warning us about DRM back in the 90s exactly
| expected this future.
| lm28469 wrote:
| I have a kindle for more than a decade and I never bought a
| book on amazon or anywhere else. I use it as a reader, it's
| never been connected to internet
| FpUser wrote:
| Same. I keep it as a reader for my mother and upload books to
| it using USB.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| Where do you source your books? I love my Kindle as an
| ereader and I get the books from my library, which sends them
| to my Kindle via Amazon. So I am connected to the internet.
| internet_points wrote:
| Note that if you ever do, it'll delete stuff you've added to
| it. I connect mine to the net every week or so (I like the
| translate feature, and use some pocket-to-kindle thing), but
| if I ever leave it for over a month or so it deletes my
| books. (Fortunately it's easy to get them back from calibre,
| but very annoying.)
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| My Kobo Clara 2 shows up as a USB mass storage device, and I
| can just drag and drop pretty much any kind of document.
|
| There's also a sqlite database in there that contains, I think,
| all of the device's settings and other data, including some
| crypto stuff for the DRM books that I bought in Kobo's store.
|
| It did insist on an account when I first used it, though. This
| can be worked around by fiddling with the sqlite database, but
| I just signed up instead.
| exe34 wrote:
| Ah that means I've bought my last book off Amazon already! It was
| a good run.
| m463 wrote:
| For me, this means you can't get to the kindle ebook files to use
| on other e-readers.
|
| also, all your reading telemetry will probably be available to
| amazon.
| LorenDB wrote:
| Hopefully they don't do the same to Amazon Music's "Purchase as
| MP3" option.
| _peeley wrote:
| I'm surprised that this is being dropped, but the "Send to
| Kindle"[0] feature is still supported. I would imagine that the
| email servers (and whatever other behind-the-scenes cruft it
| requires) to relay files to individual Kindle devices is a much
| bigger maintenance burden and "piracy" enabler than transferring
| via USB.
|
| I'm a huge user of the Send to Kindle feature via my Calibre
| library too, so this has me pretty bummed and pessimistic for the
| future. I guess if the worst comes to pass, I can just look into
| jailbreaking or getting any of the zillion other Android-based
| eReaders from AliExpress.
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/sendtokindle/email
| ajaksalad wrote:
| Article mentions Calibre will continue to work:
|
| _*You can continue to use Calibre to send Kindle books to your
| Kindle_
|
| _*Send to Kindle will continue to work_
| _peeley wrote:
| Sure, I read that in TFA too. My point is that if USB
| transfers of Kindle eBooks are being sunsetted, I would
| estimate that Send to Kindle's days are also numbered.
| notatoad wrote:
| send to kindle requires that you connect your kindle to the
| cloud, which gives it a chance to sync up all the data the
| device has collected while it has been offline.
|
| it seems pretty clear that's what's really important to them -
| they want all that sweet sweet telemetry, and could care less
| whether you're actually buying the books or not.
| pezdeath wrote:
| That and they'd rather the small % of users that use the
| kindle for piracy keep doing that vs going to another
| ecosystem
| ForHackernews wrote:
| I've been quite happy with my Kobo and the choice to avoid the
| Kindle/Amazon walled garden.
| yegle wrote:
| The "Send to Kindle" has a hard limit of 50MiB if done via
| Email, or 200MiB if done via amazon.com/sendtokindle.
|
| My complaint on this feature is mostly that the only supported
| proper ebook format is now epub, and I frequently run into the
| E999 error. Sometimes I can workaround it by converting the
| epub to mobi and back, but sometimes it just keeps failing
| which is frustrating.
|
| (I run Calibre on a Linux headless box in Docker so connecting
| it to USB then transfer is toily)
| skwee357 wrote:
| The biggest implication of this is that you can no longer buy
| e-books in amazing and read them on a NON kindle device.
|
| On the other hand, I'm not sure if it was possible due to DRM.
|
| Anyway, things like this just piss me off. I kind of succumbed to
| the idea that I don't own movies and music, but I just can't
| contemplate the fact that they took books away from us (yea, I
| know that technically you didn't own kindle books anyway).
| 42772827 wrote:
| The article includes a description of the feature that was copied
| wholesale from this HN comment:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41897425#41897573
| memhole wrote:
| One day something happened and all my books were gone. It's been
| sitting there since. I'm hoping one day I'll use it for a project
| and be able to flash a different os or harvest the e-ink display.
|
| I wonder how hard it is to DIY your own reader?
| https://www.waveshare.com/epaper
| stevetron wrote:
| It is confusing.
|
| I've downloaded books off of Project Gutenberg, and some of them
| will not transfer-copy-move (pick your term) to my Kindle Paper-
| White. I've transferred other books before.
|
| One book that won't transfer is "Stand By: The Story of a Boy's
| Achievement in Radio" by Hugh McAlister, January 1930. All that
| transfers is the front cover.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| I have never had that happen before with my kindle paper-white.
| I've never connected it to the internet; everything is moved
| over to it via usb. I convert everything to mobi files.
|
| Have you looked at the same file in Calibre? Mobi files are
| usually fine, but some Gutenberg ebooks have bizarre formatting
| when you open them on a kindle/ereader.
| shironandonon_ wrote:
| Shame on you, Bezos. Hopefully my Kobo never dies (I'm on my
| third on e ...)
| iamdamian wrote:
| I saw this coming and moved to Kobo recently. I haven't regretted
| the move once.
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