Amazon’s Closing Yet Another Kindle Loophole To Backup Your Purchased E-Books
Contents
Summary
- Amazon’s Kindle e-reader quality is declining, and discouraged users might turn to DRM removal options.
- Amazon is increasing efforts to block DRM removal; a new version requirement will be added to the Kindle Android app.
- Consider switching to competitors like Rakuten’s Kobo or Google Books due to Amazon’s anti-DRM removal stance.
It’s no secret that the quality of Kindle e-reader devices is slipping. The latest generation leaves a lot to be desired with cut corners and what appears to be a lack of quality control. Things are so bad that Amazon’s chief product officer, Panos Panay, has publicly stated “no more cut corners,” which sounds like good news for the hardware side.
Still, this lack of quality could easily lead to users leaving the Kindle platform for greener pastures. It’s likely these customers will want to bring their e-book purchases with them, leading to a rise in common DRM removal methods, which would certainly explain Amazon’s newfound interest in fighting the means to remove DRM from its e-books.
Related
You don’t own your Kindle e-books, and Amazon wants it to stay that way
Another method of backing up your Kindle purchases is set to disappear this month
Amazon’s Kindle software is often old and leaves a lot to be desired, and currently, it appears the company is fighting its customers to wrestle back control of this software (via Good E-Reader) by killing anything that helps customers remove DRM from their purchased e-books. You see, thanks to a California law, Amazon was recently forced to clarify on its store that when you purchase a Kindle e-book, you are only purchasing a license, and not the actual file, drawing light to the issue as the California law intended. You don’t own your Kindle e-book purchases, and this likely means many are looking for methods to right this anti-consumer treatment.
In turn, Amazon has busied itself this year, killing common methods to remove DRM from its e-books, such as removing the Download & Transfer via USB feature on its website, along with requiring full email addresses for Send to Kindle. However, the latest effort is the most egregious yet: Amazon will soon require every Kindle Android app to be on a version newer than 2022, removing the ability to use older Kindle app versions to pull down specific file formats for easy DRM removal, starting May 26th, which is this month.
Much like on PC, where older Kindle apps were used to pull down e-books in a particular format that is easy to remove DRM from, Amazon’s Android app has been useful for the same thing, utilizing older apps to download older file formats that are already cracked. Amazon does not want its customers abusing these formats, and so it will start enforcing that the Kindle Android app can no longer be older than version v8.51 from 2022, ensuring that the e-books the app downloads are the newer versions that aren’t cracked, and thus you can’t remove their DRM.
Amazon is currently sending out e-mails that specify the upcoming limitation and how to update the app, which will only support Android 9.0 and up.
Removing DRM from e-books in the US is technically illegal
According to DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), it is technically illegal to remove DRM from your e-books in the US. Amazon has every right to block customers from removing DRM, but that doesn’t mean these anti-consumer moves aren’t any less distasteful. When the competition tends to sell ePubs that are easily cracked, Amazon stands alone, soon selling e-books that will never leave its platform.
Worse, Amazon has already proven why having no control over your e-book library and where it can be read can backfire on customers spectacularly, such as when Amazon moved Comixology’s library to the Kindle platform, outright deleting some purchases while replacing many other books with low-res versions. If you don’t control your library, there’s a good chance the company that does will ruin it, just like Amazon did with Comixology. In other words, Amazon has proven itself untrustworthy when it comes to our digital comic purchases, which is probably why so many are keen to remove DRM from their Kindle e-books, legality or not.
Rakuten and Google to the rescue
Take a wild guess which stores sell ePubs with easily removed DRM. Just about all of them, except for the Kindle store. It would seem Amazon is betting on its size and inertia to keep users on its increasingly locked-down platform, but Rakuten’s Kobo store is just as competitive with a wide selection of novels and manga (not to mention killer Libby access), and even Google Books sells ePubs. Sure, ePubs may not be formatted as nicely as Amazon’s KFX. Amazon has the edge here. But if you’re more concerned about whether you own your digital purchases than how they are formatted, then it may be prudent to ditch Kindle sooner rather than later, as its anti-DRM removal direction seems clear. After all, there is no shortage of free e-books out there, so why put up DRM shenanigans to begin with?
