Amazon ends kindle ebooks "Download and Transfer via USB" | Hacker News Reader

Amazon ends kindle ebooks "Download and Transfer via USB"

goodereader.com

133 pointsm46399 comments

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.

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

Same. I keep it as a reader for my mother and upload books to it using USB.

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.

I read classics and old books, the authors are long dead so I don't feel bad about downloading these. If you mostly read niche or brand new books it probably isn't as good. You can find a lot on project Gutenberg, archive.org, &c.

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.)

Same. The blog says, "Download & Transfer via USB" option will no longer be available, but "You can continue to sideload e-books on your Kindle via USB cable".

What is the difference? How is sideloading different from normal USB Transfer?

You can transfer books you make or download elsewhere to the reader over USB but Amazon is no longer going to let you download the files from them. Amazon books will only transfer directly to your reader over Wi-Fi.

Thanks for clarifying.

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.

It's even easier to skip account creation now - just add a line to a config file

https://old.reddit.com/r/kobo/comments/mt2f30/how_to_bypass_...

That is the exact opposite of this problem.

Download over usb allows you to download the kindle ebook purchased on amazon to your computer. That gives you an offline copy of your ebook. You can then download it to your kindle over usb.

But since you have the file, you can ALSO send this file to another ebook reader. I believe some ebook readers like pocketbook can read .azw files directly. Readers like kobo might need conversion to epub or kepub.

"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?

Why be objective when you can insert your own snarky commentary and simp for fucking Amazon of all places?

> 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.

Edit: It's been interesting to watch the votes on this comment swing up and down so much. Lots of activity but overall pretty split opinions it seems!

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".

Also people that legally purchase them and want to use them with non-kindle readers and applications.

  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?

Oh yeah! Hadn’t thought of this. OCR the kindle screen while flipping pages?

Probably easier to use ADB on Android to both flip and screenshot.

Nobody does that. Download and Transfer was used because it would give AZW3 instead of the newer KFX file format. DRM on KFX is much harder to remove, if at all. AZW3 is possible, hence why they are closing this "loophole".

It's still stupid because basically any book can be pirated in about 10 minutes with a knife and a sheetfed document scanner.

At least with Libby, the turning-off-wifi thing works even when the book isn't sideloaded.

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.

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.

same. I've bought it. I'm reading it on my kindle, phone, Linux laptop, etc and nobody's going to stop me.

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 § 1201 says otherwise. I'm not a lawyer, sad.

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.

what's your definition of piracy?

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.

I think most people's definition is roughly "obtaining and consuming media you haven't paid for in violation of copyright." Sometimes it's just about obtaining something in violation of copyright, even if you've already bought it (e.g. "I always buy things and then pirate them anyway because I hate the DRM but still want to support the creators."). Very few would consider stripping DRM on files you already have to be piracy, even if the DMCA forbids it, because the vast majority of people consider transfer of copyrighted material to be foundational to the meaning of the word.

back in the 90s this woulda been referred to as cracking.

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.

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.

"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.

But not the people that use Calibre, fta: You can continue to use Calibre to send Kindle books to your Kindle

But how do the kindle books purchased after feb 26 get into calibre?

I think that might be the point people miss.

From a different store? From a piracy site? From a friend or family member? From a different retailer? By breaking the encryption?

Perhaps the other people didn't miss the point at all.

just trying to clarify the nonsense point in the article:

  Here are some essential facts to know.

  - You can continue to use Calibre to send Kindle books to your Kindle

sidesteps the fact that you might not be able to get your books into calibre anymore because

"Download & Transfer via USB"

on Feb 26 "Download" goes away, which was the typical way people got their kindle books into calibre.

Via desktop Kindle Reader app.

Goodereader is trash tier and aleays has been.

They're either brainwashed, or being paid by Amazon.

Guilty as charged! I've used it to de-DRM and transfer my bought ebooks to read them on my pocketbook. But, good to know that me, refusing to buy another kindle as a successor to my Kindle Voyage was the right decision. Every aspect of amazon these days is garbage experience - be it retail, books or video. Also got rid of prime years ago.

> 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

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

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

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.

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.

That and they’d rather the small % of users that use the kindle for piracy keep doing that vs going to another ecosystem

I've been quite happy with my Kobo and the choice to avoid the Kindle/Amazon walled garden.

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)

Removing DRM became essential after my Amazon account was compromised . After hours on the phone with Amazon customer support proving I was the account owner, I gave up and created a new account.

They didn’t give me any way to keep my digital assets.I lost over a decade of ebook and audiobook purchases!

Now I won’t buy anything unless I can remove the DRM from it.

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

Presumably, yes. I will at least try to do so.

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.

And deletes them too.

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.

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.

Will you still be able to use Calibre to copy your books from your Kindle to Calibre via USB? I like to backup.

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).

And in the same vein, the oldest Kindles that were cellular-only (1, 2, and DX) are now fully shunned from buying Amazon books, as they could only download new purchases via the USB feature as Sprint's CDMA network had sunset.

I held onto my early-model cellular Kindles as long as I could because Whispernet was just such a novel thing at the time, and having the 'experimental' web browsing on 3G was a nice little treat.

Earlier: Amazon is closing a Kindle loophole that makes it easy to remove DRM https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43039924

Why does it say "You can continue to sideload e-books on your Kindle via USB cable" at the bottom? Isn't that contradictory?

you can't download Kindle ebooks, but I suppose you could get them elsewhere?

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?

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.

Note however that for the newest revision of kindles, they never had the feature of transferring files via USB, so for the newest kindles you need to do the wifi option even for non-Amazon sourced ebooks.

Do you have a decent source for that? Because the articles I'm seeing just say that they use MTP now, instead of USB mass storage, but that still lets you transfer files via USB.

also "Send to Kindle will continue to work" which works over wifi https://www.amazon.com/sendtokindle

I understand that part. I was wondering specifically about the USB functionality because there was that sentence that made it unclear.

If you have ebooks from other sources, like Project Gutenberg, you can still load them on your Kindle.

Got it. In that case, what is different about the feature being disabled?

Download and transfer is for books bought off Amazon. A way to get books on if you didn't have cellular or Wifi.

I see. So I will not have to worry about this if all of my Amazon purchased books are on my device.

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.

There's that word again! "sideload"

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

Koreader is absolutely awesome software and runs on Android.

> 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?

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.

Last year I met an elderly woman whose extraordinary life was the subject of a book. This book, which was inspiring to several friends of mine, was unfortunately only published in Japanese, which I cannot read. I wanted to try using an LLM to create a bootleg English edition (for my own use), but was stymied by recent upgrades to Kindle DRM.

Amazon has been poking publishers in the eye for a few years with Kindle features like text-to-speech (2009) and speech-to-text (2019, Chronicle v. Audible) that improve accessibility. But I don't hold out much hope for a translation feature that could unlock millions of books and the insights of other cultures.

I know for a fact this method was not the primary method for pirating e-books from Amazon among the 'scene'. However, it was likely the most accessible for everyone else.

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.

I wish Kobo would accept my Kindle as partial payment for one of their units. Can't wait to switch away from Bezos.

Made the switch myself not long ago. Only thing that annoyed me: I was still forced to connect the device to "activate" it. Even though I use VPN on my router, it still seems silly that the device I purchased requires such activation. Anyway, after that I installed KoReader (along with a font called ChareInk6SP) and started to transfer epubs from Calibre via KoReader's Calibre plugin. If you have a large collection on Kindle I would suggest you first try and get those into your Calibre before doing anything else.

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.

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.

My Kindle Keyboard (3rd gen) from 2010 still works fine. After upgrading to a higher-capacity battery, it actually performs better (i.e. lasts longer between charges) than when it was new. The best part is I'll always have the reliable USB file transfer option.

Just won't be able to download future amazon kindle purchases to transfer over usb.

I almost purchased a Kindle Scribe this year but went with a Supernote Manta instead. I couldn’t be happier. It runs the Kindle app but also KOReader so I can read pdfs transferred from my computer. It’s awesome for papers and pdf copies of documentation.

Hopefully they don't do the same to Amazon Music's "Purchase as MP3" option.

The article includes a description of the feature that was copied wholesale from this HN comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41897425#41897573

I saw this coming and moved to Kobo recently. I haven't regretted the move once.

Ah that means I've bought my last book off Amazon already! It was a good run.

Check out PocketBook for an alternative.

What a dumbass decision

BOOX: GOTO BOOX

Shame on you, Bezos. Hopefully my Kobo never dies (I’m on my third on e …)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com