Emergency-ish Dispatch for Kindle Users

Photo by Luis Sánchez on Unsplash

I thought it was YouTube/Instagram/evil algorithm nonsense, but it turns out that the threats are real: Starting on the 26th, you will no longer be able to download your Kindle books from the Kindle store, and instead they will only be available through the Rumornet? Gossipnet?…WHISPERnet!

I knew I’d get it eventually.

What this means is that, as little as you ever “owned” books purchased on the Kindle store, you’ll own them even less now.

I mean, technically, kinda, sorta you’ll still own them, but you’ll only be able to RETRIEVE them if you’ve got a Kindle or are using a Kindle app.

It’s been suggested you might want to download your Kindle Library before it’s too late.

What’s the Law Say?

Well, I couldn’t find any great resources on this, and I’m not going to read like a hundred pages of licensing, so it may be the case that downloading the books you’ve purchased for any reason other than to immediately dump them on a Kindle MAY be a legal gray area.

Here are the best cases I can make for downloads and conversions of file types:

1. If the ability to download the files is made available by Amazon, downloading those files likely falls within the agreement we all make when buying Kindle books.

2. Adobe has a guide to converting your Kindle books to PDF, and I figure Adobe is a pretty big company that I suspect wouldn’t put out a guide like this if it were not permitted, so this makes me suspicious that the action is kosher.

3. Amazon makes it kind of a pain in the ass to download all your purchased titles, you have to do them one-by-one, so I suspect this is legal, but they don’t WANT you to do it. [update: here’s a way you can do it significantly faster, it worked for me, but it DID miss a couple on some pages, so check that the number matches up properly after doing each page]

4. Amazon disallows transfer of library checkouts using this method, so the ability to block you from downloading has always been possible, technologically speaking, so it’s not like they’re offering the download option because they are being compelled to, technologically.

I want to make a note here: I am not advocating the pirating of materials, just the copying of files you’ve already purchased for the sake of having a backup in case the Kindle environment changes such that it’s no longer usable.

What Amazon Says

Use of Kindle Content. Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider…

Limitations. Unless specifically indicated otherwise, you may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense, or otherwise assign any rights to the Kindle Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove or modify any proprietary notices or labels on the Kindle Content. In addition, you may not attempt to bypass, modify, defeat, or otherwise circumvent any digital rights management system or other content protection or features used as part of the Service.

This might hurt the case for file conversion. I’m not sure if converting something from the proprietary Amazon format also always involves braking the DRM or not, but my best guess goes back to the Adobe link above: I would think that if this were totally disallowed, Amazon would’ve chatted with Adobe about this by now.

Again, I am not an expert, consult with a spiritual advisor.

Why Was Download Ever Offered?

Ah, back in the day, working as a librarian in the wild west of eReader times, transferring eBooks from a computer to an eReader was standard eBook operating procedure for everything BUT Kindle.

Guys, these were dark times. If you bought a Barnes and Noble Nook, you had to hook it up to a computer, open Adobe Digital Editions, and the license/login you used in Digital Editions had to match something you did on your Nook as well. Which it almost never did.

If you bought a Kobo, something similar was required.

If you bought a Sony, an eReader that was format neutral and the way I wish things had gone, same deal.

If you bought a Literari, you had to do the above, plus you had to take the device to a ritual circle and pray to either Sylvian or Gro-goroth by making either a show of love or blood sacrifice.

It was a huge pain in the ass, and even though the Kindle was not able to check out eBooks from Overdrive at that time (it has since changed), I would often recommend getting a Kindle, especially for those who could easily afford books but were not technologically inclined. It was just an easier environment to work in.

For book ownership, and for those willing to tinker, bad, but for those who just wanted to read and had a few bucks to spend on books, good.

I think USB transfer has become somewhat of a vestigial ability in the Kindle environment. I can’t imagine many folks are hooking up their Kindles to their computers these days. Which I say as one of 5 people who was mega unhappy that Overdrive would no longer let you download MP3 audiobooks to place on your MP3 player. :(

Why This is the Dystopic Technofuture

We give up our rights for convenience, basically, and that’s hard to turn down.

When we bought print books, we OWNED them. We could do just about anything we wanted. We can copy them for personal use. We can rebind them and use them in a different format. We can sell them (not copies, but we can resell that one copy). We can put them in a library!

But my concern is less about ownership than it is about being locked into specific environments.

When you have a Kindle and Kindle books (I have both, so I’m not looking down on you in my superiority here), you are in an uncomfortable marriage with Amazon. Severing that tie is a problem. If you cancel your Amazon account, your Kindle books may *poof* vanish from your Kindle. Because having an account may be a part of the licensing agreement.

If Amazon puts out Kindle 2.0 next year and decides to stop supporting 1.0 Kindles, well, that would fucking suck, and they can absolutely do that.

If they decide the Whispernet is too expensive to continue, it can be shut down.

If Amazon wants to disallow library checkouts to be sent to Kindles, they can do that at any time.

If Amazon decides to pull self-published books from their store tomorrow, they can, and all of those files will vanish.

What this does is to trap people within a specific environment, a specific brand of tech, and we all just have to hope it’ll be here tomorrow.

Why I Think this Encourages Piracy

I am not a fan of piracy, but I do think this policy encourages piracy more than it helps keep it tamped down.

My theories on this come from the world of video games: Games are some of the most pirated pieces of media in existence.

This has some factors we can’t ignore: Games are relatively expensive, there aren’t a lot of outlets that loan them out, and, up until recently, the availability of old games was a tough market where players and collectors competed for the same resources, but not while having the same goals.

But I do think an element of this is that video games are often difficult to play in their original formats, and this is because a Nintendo game can only be played on a Nintendo console, a Sega game on a Sega console, and so on.

It’s impossible to purchase a new Sega Genesis console. You can get emulators and other things, but a Sega Genesis cannot be had.

And for a long time, this meant that many, many games you might remember from childhood were unplayable. You might even still own the cartridge and be unable to play it.

Things have improved, but only marginally.

I have an NES Classic, I love it, it’s a convenient way to play a lot of great old games, there’s no wifi to fuck with, it’s exactly what I want. BUT, my controller has crapped out, and it turns out Nintendo doesn’t make this type of controller anymore. So even though the console and the games work just fine, in order to be incredibly frustrated by Ghosts n Goblins, I have to find a 3rd party controller, and I have to just hope, I guess, that someone continues to make them.

[you can tell this game is hard as hell because when you google “Ghosts n Goblins NES, 99% of the images are from THE FIRST STAGE]

I just want to be able to play the games I like, and I don’t want to have to rebuy them every 5 years or so. I’m willing to pay a fair price for them. Once.

Video game piracy offers the option to use one device to play, basically, everything, on one console that you manage, using files that don’t change, are not connected to wifi, that offer pretty universal control options, and—look, it just makes a lot more sense.

Because I don’t need to have Console X to play Game Y, it makes gaming much simpler and more fun.

I get it, this is how companies make money. I’m a game purchaser, but goddamn do I start getting nervous when Nintendo announces Switch 2 is coming. Because I know that my Switch, which I got about a year ago, has a countdown on it now. Soon enough, I don’t know that I’ll be able to play any of the games I’ve purchased.

In the book world, it’d be kind of like a book being printed in a secret spy ink that only shows up when it’s read under the light cast by a specific, proprietary type of light bulb manufactured by one specific publisher. And when they stop making that light bulb because that was an insane idea and not sustainable, the book is no longer usable.

So how surprised are we going to be when that book shows up on Internet Archive in plain text?

Storage AND Retrieval

One of the classes that used to be very standard in library school was “Information Storage and Retrieval.” Thrilling, I know.

What has always been interesting to me, what I think people often misunderstand about libraries, is that without the retrieval aspect, information is essentially useless.

If information is aggressively paywalled, if information is inaccessible, if a cartridge doesn’t have a console, hell, if a book is on the 5th floor and the elevator is broken, you might as well not have that information at all.

That’s my beef with the world of videogames: I HAVE them, I HAVE Super Nintendo and N64 and Gamecube and Playstation games, they’re just to my right, right now. But I have no way to play them.

Information storage is possible, it’s up to me, and I have agency there. But the retrieval is cut off.

And that’s the problem with what Amazon is doing: They are allowing the purchase and storage of eBooks, but the retrieval is locked down such that it may someday no longer be possible to read what you’ve purchased.

What I Have to Say as an Author

Yeah, I mean, as far as I’m concerned, if you bought one of my books, I’d like you to continue to have access to it forever.

It doesn’t benefit me to have you locked into one environment or another, so I don’t have a horse in this race other than to say that I want you to enjoy the books you purchased, and I do think that you should be allowed to enjoy those on your timeline.

I recommend you buy my stuff in print.

But, if you’re going to buy an eBook, hey, I’m not going to hate on that.

I want you to buy and enjoy, however that works for you.

As a Consumer

Look, I get it, people have a lot of feelings about Amazon, and…well, here’s my take:

Books aren’t a totally insignificant source of revenue for Amazon (print books account for 10% of their revenue), but, honestly, I’m not unhappy with the book side of Amazon.

I don’t think it’s wrong or stupid to go Kindle.

It’s easy to use, you can access damn near anything that’s in digital form, the Kindle itself is a very solid device. The tradeoff we all need to understand is that we gain convenience, but we lose ownership. For some of us, depending on reading habits and so on, that might be just fine.

I would just make some suggestions for modifying your Kindle use, though:

1. Buy only what you will read, and read what you buy — Don’t buy stuff that you’ll get around to someday, buy only those books you intend to read immediately. This means there’s not much back catalog that could get wiped out or that you’d lose access to in the case that your device is no longer supported.

2. When you can wait, and especially in print, always check whether you can buy straight from the publisher, and do so when possible.

3. Get comfortable using Calibre and sending files TO your Kindle that you’ve purchased elsewhere. That way, you can potentially own your eBooks. Here, I’ll make this easy: Here’s a book I wrote. You are welcome to download it in whatever format you want. Here’s a link to Calibre, a software that can convert eBooks to different formats. Here’s a guide to doing those conversions (note that the specific file types recommended, like MOBI, might no longer be available, but the general directions are still pretty close). Here’s a link to the formats you can send to your Kindle via email. I’m assuming you will handle the legalities here and am not advocating anything illegal.

4. Download what you’ve already purchased before the 26th:
   access your “Content Library” while logged into your account. For purchased books you select the “More actions” menu, choose “Download & transfer via USB,” select a Kindle device you have registered, and a copy of the book will be downloaded to your computer.
   You’ll have to do these one-by-one, which is a pain, but it may be worth it. If you’re not sure, prioritize those books you haven’t read yet. And books that I wrote, which you certainly have.

A Last Thought

I heard something interesting on a podcast, which was speculation that streaming services really don’t change much, in terms of their utility or function, because instead they fight over who has what content, and the content is what draws people to one service or another.

But that’s often content they haven’t made, it’s just stuff that came out elsewhere that they’re fighting over (with the exception of Netflix, which does make quite a bit of its own stuff).

Take The Office, for example. Hugely popular, brings people to a service, then it leaves and people follow it to another service.

None of us have CBS All Access because we fucking love it, as a service. We have it because we want to watch Trek, baby!

What this means is that these services really have no incentive to be the best streaming platform, to be the best retrieval software, and instead collect the best information.

I would hope that Kindle is going to get better, that eReaders are going to improve because, for the most part, they all have access to everything, so the only real option is to create an interface that people prefer.

But this move doesn’t give me a ton of confidence in that.

It feels a lot more like iTunes. So many of us bought so much music in iTunes, only to see the iPod and desktop software vaporize and leave us with a whole shitload of unusable files.