Don't Lose Access to Your Ebooks (Read by 2/26)
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REMINDER: You don’t really own any of your digital content. You pay for access to it, which Amazon can shut off whenever they feel like.
In this case, Amazon/Kindle users will no longer be able to download and transfer their ebooks beginning on Wednesday, February 26. This matters because if Amazon decides to pull any of the content on their site after that for any reason, including censorship? There goes your stuff. That you paid to be able to read. Which is bullshit.
(And that’s without me even launching into a screed about digital rights management, the increasing amount of information locked behind paywalls, risk of long-term knowledge loss, or possibility for narrative erasure that sounds a lot like… dun dun dun politics.)
Want to maintain access to your stuff? Download it now. You can follow this tutorial. It doesn’t take long. In my case, I wanted to save the files on my laptop and had to download the Kindle reader app as a result, but all that did was make a filepath for them on my computer. I can still use Calibre to convert those files out of Amazon’s proprietary format and into .epub files that I can use on non-Kindle devices.
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If you have a little bit of tech savvy, there’s a bulk download tool you can set up locally to use. https://github.com/treetrum/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader
