Farewell to Kindle offline downloads
Reader Michael asks:
“My online feeds are currently flooded with dire clickbaity warnings about how Amazon is blocking people from downloading Kindle books in a few weeks. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on this at some point.”
Michael is referring to the fact that Amazon used to offer the ability to download Kindle ebooks you purchased to your a PC (or Mac), which let you store them offline or convert them to other formats. Not all that many people knew about it, which no doubt is why that ability is going away at the end of the month.
My thoughts:
1.) This isn’t a good thing.
2.) Nevertheless, it will only matter to a minority of users.
3.) If you want files of my books, you can get them from my Payhip store.
To expand upon those thoughts:
1.) My frank opinion is that this is a bad decision on Amazon’s part. Anything that reduces consumer choice and restricts the ability to store data locally is a bad thing. That’s not an ideological opinion, but a technological one. The Internet and the cloud are not infallible and often stop working at inconvenient times. I worked in IT for too long to ever really trust the Internet or the cloud, and remember “the cloud” just means “somebody else’s server” that might get turned off at any point.
This reinforces that when you are buying digital content from Amazon, you’re not actually “buying” it, you’re buying a “license” to view it under certain circumstances.
Additionally, not many people carefully download every ebook they purchase and keep them carefully organized in local storage, but some do.
2.) That said, I suspect not all that many people actually do that. Ebooks really have replaced the mass market paperback in the publishing ecosystem. Mass market paperbacks were intended to be cheap and relatively disposable. No doubt you have noticed that hardcover books tend to last a lot longer than mass market paperbacks. I suspect ebooks have filled the mass market paperback niche for many people, and a lot of ebooks are read once and then only infrequently read again, if ever. So I suspect the vast majority of Kindle users won’t even realize this has happened.
3.) If you are one of those readers who keeps ebooks carefully organized in offline storage, and you still want to download local copies of my books after you buy them, then your best bet is my Payhip store. If you get a book from my Payhip store, you’ll receive both an EPUB and a PDF, and an EPUB is very easy to convert into any format you might wish. Amusingly, Amazon is not removing the ability to sideload content onto your Kindle or the Send To My Kindle service. So you could buy a book from my Payhip store and sideload it onto your Kindle, or email it to the Send To My Kindle service so it appears automatically on your device.
I have to admit this is a reminder of something I’ve known for 20 years – if you buy digital content and want to keep it forever, you have to work at it. I have like 44 gigabytes of MP3 files I’ve been moving from computer to computer for years, and I have a large collection of carefully organized PDFs of computer game manuals and RPG books that I’ve acquired from places like DriveThruRPG.
Of course, if you really, really want to keep a book forever, paper remains the way to go, and most of my books are in paperback.
-JM
