Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th

There have been several threads about this on HN over the past few days and months. Just to avoid the confusion that seems to follow these, a few notes:<p>(1) This is the &quot;Download and Transfer&quot; option where Amazon allowed users to select books they had purchased a license to and download them from the Amazon website.<p>(2) The ability to transfer books from your computer to your Kindle using a USB cable is <i>not</i> affected.<p>(3) The ability to send non-Amazon-licensed ePubs using the Send to Kindle email feature is <i>not</i> affected.

I spent yesterday morning downloading <i>ALL</i> my (~2400) Kindle books using the command line utility from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yihong0618&#x2F;Kindle_download_helper">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yihong0618&#x2F;Kindle_download_helper</a><p>In case anyone else needs to do something similar: Log in to your Amazon account &gt; Manage Your Content and Devices<p>Copy the cookie and save it to a file (&#x27;cookie.txt&#x27;): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yihong0618&#x2F;Kindle_download_helper?tab=readme-ov-file#retrieving-cookie">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yihong0618&#x2F;Kindle_download_helper?tab=rea...</a><p>Execute the Python utility (this example accesses amazon.co.uk):<p><pre><code> python kindle.py --cookie-file cookie.txt --uk -o DOWNLOADS --device_sn [Your Kindle serial no.] --mode all </code></pre> You can also download a JSON list containing details of all your Kindle books:<p><pre><code> python kindle.py --cookie-file cookie.txt --uk --list --device_sn [Your Kindle serial no.] </code></pre> There are other methods outlined in the README, but this worked best for me.<p>I also extracted a list of cover URLs from the JSON file using a basic Python script (with output redirected to a file &#x27;covers.txt&#x27;):<p><pre><code> import json with open(&#x27;book-list.json&#x27;) as f: json_data = json.load(f) for i in range(len(json_data)): print(json_data[i][&#x27;productImage&#x27;]) </code></pre> And then I used wget to download them all too:<p><pre><code> wget --wait=3 --random-wait --input-file=covers.txt </code></pre> Of course, the books are still DRM&#x27;d, but it&#x27;s trivial to DeDRM them later. The crucial thing was to <i>get the files before it&#x27;s too late!</i>

I’m not sure why anyone buys Kindles when there are so many better options available.<p>I bought a Kobo Clara years ago, and it supports regular MOBI and ePub files.<p>My book purchases are no longer liked with the reader and I’ve never had a problem in all these years. And this wasn’t even the best or best value for money device I could have bought.<p>Today there are so many other better alternatives in all price points and form factors.

I hear the complaints about Kindle but...<p>How are we supposed to do?<p>In three &quot;taps&quot; I buy a book and 10s later I start reading it. Legally. The device just works.<p>The alternatives? Libraries here (France) have a very limited offer of ebooks. Even for ebooks in English. I owned a Kobo circa 2013 and it was awful. I tried friend&#x27;s devices more recently, and it&#x27;s not the UX I expect from a &quot;book&quot;.<p>A simple comparison; &quot;Parable of the Sower&quot;, bought it for 3.49€ on amazon.fr, it&#x27;s at 5.26€ on ebooks.com and it still got DRMs.<p>Even pirating is less convenient: some files are buggy, some files are weird OCR of physical books, you have to deal with the download and transfer...<p>And I just can&#x27;t read physical books. I hate that.<p>So usually, if I really enjoy an ebook, I buy a physical copy in a local bookstore and give it to a friend&#x2F;whoever I think is going to like it.<p>I would love an open ecosystem where I could rent ebooks from a library, and buy books that can be read wherever I want. But that&#x27;s not going to happen because the big guns of the industry think they know better.<p>So that&#x27;s where I&#x27;m at: buying &amp; reading books in Amazon&#x27;s walled garden, or doing neither at all.

By the way, all kindle models are currently jailbreakable: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kindlemodding.org&#x2F;jailbreaking&#x2F;WinterBreak&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kindlemodding.org&#x2F;jailbreaking&#x2F;WinterBreak&#x2F;</a>

This is especially obnoxious for books that are already DRM-free. For example, one can presently buy a Tor (the publisher, not the onion router) book from the Kindle store, download the azw3 file, use a tool like KindleUnpacker [0] to more or less losslessly convert it to ePub, and read it anywhere. There&#x27;s no DRM to break!<p>[0] KindleUnpacker follows in the IMO utterly bizarre tradition in the epub tool writing scene of making it obvious how to run a really bad Tk UI wrapper and hiding the actual command-line tool in lib&#x2F;. And of wanting an output <i>directory</i> instead of a filename. And of leaving a whole pile of unnecessary temporary files around. And of forcing you to look through the temporary crap to even find the output. Oh well; the actual output is excellent.

For people already locked into Kindle, I don&#x27;t know what to tell you. (Unless you DRM-crack, and get into the gray areas of the piracy culture that&#x27;s <i>creating</i> much of the DRM problems.)<p>But it would be healthy for everyone if people supported a DRM-free and non-surveillance ebook ecosystem.<p>One solution I found is to buy ebooks as DRM-free EPUBs and PDFs, and read them in open source desktop tools and on my relatively decent PocketBook InkPad Lite.<p>Some details at: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.neilvandyke.org&#x2F;ebooks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.neilvandyke.org&#x2F;ebooks&#x2F;</a>

I don’t really get the Kindle hype. Kobo is a vastly better experience and the unlimited plans are more affordable. Kobo is $8 a month, $10 for books and audiobooks. Kindle is $12 flat. Kobo has g drive and Dropbox integration. Also the e-readers use the same screens (minus the “colorsoft” which is still a e-ink product).

Discussions<p>(120 points, 3 days ago, 93 comments) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43041726">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43041726</a><p>(50 points, 2 days ago, 23 comments) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43046995">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43046995</a><p>(120 points, 1 day ago, 101 comments) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43058889">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43058889</a>

Kobo has a sideloading mode that disables all connected-services by default (no need for an account, no online store necessary). Highly recommended alternative.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.the-ebook-reader.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;01&#x2F;21&#x2F;kobo-software-update-4-31-released-adds-sideloaded-mode&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.the-ebook-reader.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;01&#x2F;21&#x2F;kobo-software-u...</a>

I’ve tried leaving kindle but keep coming back because of how well it syncs side-loaded (via email) epub reading progress between the physical reader and the kindle app on my iPhone.<p>I recently got a Boox Palma, which I love, but the Android Kindle app can’t display time remaining in a chapter for emailed epubs. I find this very surprising, considering both the kindle hardware readers and iPhone kindle app have no problem doing this. Sharing this story in case someone else has run into this and identified a solution.

I have a heap of graphic novels I bought for my kids that are basically unusable because Amazon moved everything into Kindle and I couldn&#x27;t have them in a separate comixology app for my kids anymore and Kindle doesn&#x27;t allow me to curate family books for kids as I wish. Lesson learned. No more Kindle&#x2F;comixology&#x2F;audible purchases in this household. I considered breaking the DRM but we never bought into their readers.<p>I think hard copies (not from Amazon) are the only reasonable non-infringing option for book lovers. Returning to real libraries to supplement individual purchases lets you access more content for your money and buying a physical copy that might be read once or twice is unsustainable.<p>If you have to do digital I think piracy is becoming the only reasonable answer. I always thought it was immoral to deprive authors of income if you could afford to do the right thing but with AI companies like Meta downloading terabytes of copyright content for their own commercial gain why should the rest of us feel guilty downloading for personal use?

[dupe] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43046995">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43046995</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43039924">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43039924</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43041726">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43041726</a>

This is a problem that can only be fixed by legislation. Other things being equal DRM that&#x27;s convenient for the vast majority increases book sales and consumers aren&#x27;t willing to pay enough more for DRM free books to cover the difference -- much less understand the difference between &#x27;owning&#x27; books and &#x27;if we feel like it&#x27; licenses. And even if a general (i.e. not O&#x27;REILLY) ebook&#x2F;ereader vender just wanted to do the right thing it&#x27;s far from clear you could write a license that is flexible enough to allow pivoting with changing market conditions, get good deals with publishers but not so flexible as to be meaningless. And it&#x27;s hard to sell a more expensive DRM free option alongside since, as the DRM free price goes up each sale is more likely to be sold to a &#x27;pirate&#x27;.

Bad, but anyone sideloading would skip Kindles anyway for a long time now for much better products.

I just ordered a Kobo. Done with Amazon.

I have a medium sized collection of Kindle books. I stay in the ecosystem because I enjoy the convenience of being able to read on my phone and tablet, and I enjoy being able to write and sync notes and highlights.<p>I would have liked to have all the books on my hard drive, fully searchable. But it seems like it won’t be possible now? I guess I’ll have to make do with my notes.

It sounds like this applies to backing up to a hard drive etc, and for some people, then removing DRM from their kindle books.<p>I understand the worry, but for me I was more worried about losing the ability to side-load books, which I don&#x27;t think is being removed.

I bought a Tolino vision color (a rebranded Kobo Libra Color with shittier software) a few months ago. If Amazon no longer allows me to download purchased books, I can no longer de-DRM them and read them offline on my phone, on my Tolino or on my computer. It seems that most stores outside Amazon have even shittier DRM than Amazon has. How am I going to be able to buy books in the future so I can actually read them?<p>I’m absolutely willing to pay for ebooks. I always did. For me, removal of the download feature will absolutely be a bookalypse.

Good reminder to all of us to check the dependencies from time to time. Services don&#x27;t last forever, which is not a problem at all, if people enter into contract consciously. What&#x27;s painful is overly relying on a service, and then having the rug pulled from underneath the feet.<p>I don&#x27;t think that this instance is particularly painful, but the lesson is still the same. If it&#x27;s important, it&#x27;s worth to back up at least the metadata.

Thank goodness I made a habit of downloading and unlocking the books that I bought on Amazon. I would hate to rush and download &gt;100 books one by one now.

As of this writing I can still connect my kindle and then read the kfx file with Calibre and then convert it to azw3 or epub (with the dedrm plugin).<p>Should I loose every way to backup my books, then probably I&#x27;d use tesseract, puppeteer and their cloud reader to re-ocr the books (it&#x27;s better than nothing). Also note that the country I live in, libraries have no ebooks. Kobo drm is another nuisance.

There was a post on HN a couple days ago about the launch of bookshop.org, which lets you buy e-books from your local bookseller. Good timing!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43056526">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43056526</a>

I didn&#x27;t know that feature existed until I saw this. Downloaded all my books last night and now I&#x27;m able to switch ecosystem - an option I didn&#x27;t think I had and probably never would have tried if they hadn&#x27;t removed it.

I&#x27;m surprised no one here has mentioned about how Winterbreak can now jailbreak any kindle regardless of its firmware, this is the way to go if you wanna get out of Amazon&#x27;s ecosystem

i have owned kindles for the better part of a decade and purchased books from the store a total of 4 times - the library and friend’s epub collections were far more appealing

Stallman calls it Swindle, for a reason. Actually, many reasons.

Solution: Buy physical books, then clone at home.

That quote really is true about present and future power moving society towards owning nothing.<p>Sounds awful and is awful for the user in practice.

Coincidentally, Libgen has been down for 4 days. Never saw that before.<p>Maybe the dark publishing forces are trying to corral their herd.

I own Kindles and I have bought a lot of ebook content from the Amazon store over the years but they don&#x27;t seem to realize that the more restrictions they put in place, the more they are incentivizing just someone going to the effort to decrypt&#x2F;de-DRM everything to epub and shoving it into a Kobo (or apple&#x27;s Books.app, or comic book reader, or anything else that reads the ebook or comic book formats)<p>...Which is exactly what I ended up doing. Decrypting 100% of my Kindle purchases so I can use them how I please, and using z-library when I was too lazy to even do so.<p>Apple understood this when the first iPod came out. Offer a better service, not shinier handcuffs.

I bought a Pocketbook after Amazon started nagging too much about connecting to the wifi. Would recommend.

How do I jailbreak Kindle books so they aren’t later removed or restricted in weird ways?

this feels like living in an alternate universe where instead of the guide changing it&#x27;s moto from &quot;dont panic&quot; to &quot;panic&quot; we get a change of user agreement notification on e reader screens

Libby is the way to go. It&#x27;s going to suck when they defund the library.

For me, although this option is still <i>there</i> on Amazon&#x27;s webpages, it doesn&#x27;t actually work. I get a popup saying &quot;You do not have any compatible devices registered for this content. Buy a Kindle or get the free Kindle reading app.&quot; (I already have the Kindle app on my phone.)<p>The files containing the book content appear to be on the phone (an Android device) and I can transfer them off it. Perhaps these are the same things that I would get on my computer if I were able to do &quot;download and transfer&quot;? So far as I can tell, however, there is no way to do anything <i>with</i> them. At least, if Calibre + the DeDRM plugin + the KFX input plugin are able to interpret them, then I have failed to find how to do so using Calibre&#x27;s famously clear and intuitive user interface.<p>(This sort of thing is why I <i>only</i> &quot;buy&quot;[1] Kindle books when they are much, much cheaper than actual physical books.)<p>[1] To buy something is to give money to its owner, after which you become its owner. Whatever it is you do when you get access to a Kindle e-book, it isn&#x27;t <i>buying</i> it; you own nothing more after handing over the money than you did before.

Is there a script to download all your Kindle books?

does anyone know if this affects the older versions of kindle for pc? You’re able to download your books from there still currently.

see also All Kindles can now be jailbroken - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43073969">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43073969</a>

something something library genesis