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Comment by tripplyons | Hacker News Reader

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

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There's that word again! "sideload"

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.

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.

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.

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