Farewell to Kindle offline downloads
Reader Michael asks:
“My online feeds are currently flooded with dire clickbaity warnings about how Amazon is blocking people from downloading Kindle books in a few weeks. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on this at some point.”
Michael is referring to the fact that Amazon used to offer the ability to download Kindle ebooks you purchased to your a PC (or Mac), which let you store them offline or convert them to other formats. Not all that many people knew about it, which no doubt is why that ability is going away at the end of the month.
My thoughts:
1.) This isn’t a good thing.
2.) Nevertheless, it will only matter to a minority of users.
3.) If you want files of my books, you can get them from my Payhip store.
To expand upon those thoughts:
1.) My frank opinion is that this is a bad decision on Amazon’s part. Anything that reduces consumer choice and restricts the ability to store data locally is a bad thing. That’s not an ideological opinion, but a technological one. The Internet and the cloud are not infallible and often stop working at inconvenient times. I worked in IT for too long to ever really trust the Internet or the cloud, and remember “the cloud” just means “somebody else’s server” that might get turned off at any point.
This reinforces that when you are buying digital content from Amazon, you’re not actually “buying” it, you’re buying a “license” to view it under certain circumstances.
Additionally, not many people carefully download every ebook they purchase and keep them carefully organized in local storage, but some do.
2.) That said, I suspect not all that many people actually do that. Ebooks really have replaced the mass market paperback in the publishing ecosystem. Mass market paperbacks were intended to be cheap and relatively disposable. No doubt you have noticed that hardcover books tend to last a lot longer than mass market paperbacks. I suspect ebooks have filled the mass market paperback niche for many people, and a lot of ebooks are read once and then only infrequently read again, if ever. So I suspect the vast majority of Kindle users won’t even realize this has happened.
3.) If you are one of those readers who keeps ebooks carefully organized in offline storage, and you still want to download local copies of my books after you buy them, then your best bet is my Payhip store. If you get a book from my Payhip store, you’ll receive both an EPUB and a PDF, and an EPUB is very easy to convert into any format you might wish. Amusingly, Amazon is not removing the ability to sideload content onto your Kindle or the Send To My Kindle service. So you could buy a book from my Payhip store and sideload it onto your Kindle, or email it to the Send To My Kindle service so it appears automatically on your device.
I have to admit this is a reminder of something I’ve known for 20 years – if you buy digital content and want to keep it forever, you have to work at it. I have like 44 gigabytes of MP3 files I’ve been moving from computer to computer for years, and I have a large collection of carefully organized PDFs of computer game manuals and RPG books that I’ve acquired from places like DriveThruRPG.
Of course, if you really, really want to keep a book forever, paper remains the way to go, and most of my books are in paperback.
-JM
Also, Amazon explicitly affirms that you are getting a license to read the book and they can yank it at any time. This allows them to take it.
This is why I went broad with D2D.
Hmm — on the other hand, book buying has, I believe, a Pareto distribution. A minority of buyers can be a large majority of books.
Your Kindle-Unlimeted eBooks are affected.
In an earlier post you promised to release them to your Payhip store later.
But you also said, that you do no longer own the Caina stories you provided to “Sword & Sorceress”.
So how far do you want to let Amazon drive you?
If they say: you may not release Kindle Unlimeted books ever?
If they say: you are only allowed to write Kindle eBooks with the (yet to be created) Kindle Writer app?
I dunno, that seems unlikely. Amazon has had a “Kindle Writer” app for years – the current version is called Kindle Create – and it’s never been mandatory and in fourteen years I’ve never actually used it.
In terms of Kindle Unlimited, only 14% of my books are in KU at the moment. Once HALF-ELVEN THIEF is completed, it will finish out its term in KU and then go wide.
This has been an issue for a long time, keeping content as the platforms change and evolve. Various book services have shut down, stranding their user base, and more will follow (Barnes and Noble has not been doing well for years). Video games are even more problematic this way, but movies, record LPs and books are right up there.
I have my parents collection of LP records. One of my tasks when I can get around to it is digitizing them, I have picked up a record player with a USB interface for the purpose. I will still keep those acrylic records, they are more durable than the DVDs I will burn the data to.
A friend’s solution to the ebook accessibility issue is piracy. Well, privateering. He buys the book regularly, then snags it from a pirate site when it becomes available. That way the author gets paid, and he can ensure his book is safe.
Yeah, I do think this will lead to a big boost in piracy. Just because most people won’t notice Amazon’s decision doesn’t mean it’s a good decision.
I am going to check to make sure all my books are downloaded to my laptop before the end. I have always done it but have noticed in the past that some books I thought I downloaded have disappeared from my files.