I’ve put up with the Amazon Kindle ecosystem for as long as I have, because it’s easier than fighting it, and cheaper than buying a different e-reader device. But it’s gotten harder and harder to justify. As you’ve probably heard, Amazon’s latest slap to the consumer’s face is their announcement that as of Wednesday, you will no longer be able to download purchased ebooks to a computer to be loaded via USB to a Kindle device.
Which not many people do, and it’s generally a lot easier just to send the book to the device directly over wifi, so who cares? But if you do the latter, you don’t have the book in a format you can back up and do anything with. If Amazon decides to — and they’ve done this — they can just delete a book from your device and your list of purchased books, leaving you with nothing.
Why you’d do that anyway
Whereas if you can download the book, in Amazon’s AZW3 format, you can store that file on your computer and re-load it to your Kindle at any time. Amazon can’t delete it.
Moreover, if it doesn’t have DRM protection, you can use the Calibre application to convert the book to other formats — most notably EPUB. Kindles don’t read EPUB but other devices, including Kobos, do.
And if it does have DRM, Calibre can’t do anything about that… but the independent DeDRM plugin for Calibre can. It’ll strip the DRM when you import your books into Calibre. Now you can do what you want with them.
(As I understand it, AZW3 is an older format, and ebooks meant to be sent to a newer Kindle are in a newer format, KFX, which is much harder to deal with. I think, if you don’t have an old enough Kindle, you might be able to get the AZW3 format with an old version of the Kindle app for Windows or Mac. Maybe. Look for those answers elsewhere, though. Me, I have a Kindle that’s at least about eight years old, so I’m good.)
Except you can’t do any of that if you can’t download the book in the first place, and as of Wednesday, you can’t. You have 1,234 books in your Kindle library and you haven’t downloaded any of them. Now what? You can start downloading them one at a time and hope you’re done by Wednesday. Or…
How you’d do that
There’s this: https://github.com/treetrum/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader/ . There you’ll find a script that’ll let you bulk download all your Kindle books.
It’s not the most user friendly thing in the world and some people have run into roadblocks getting it to work. Including me, on my main computer, but I tried again on my laptop and got it working there.
Now I have every one of my Kindle books (except a couple dozen, mostly sample previews I think, that can’t be downloaded) on my computer, and Amazon can’t touch them.
DeDRM
Removing DRM isn’t the most user-friendly process in the world either, but you can can do it. The plugin you need is here: https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools . Read the FAQ .
After Wednesday
As for Kindle books you buy after Wednesday — well, tough luck, I guess.
Which is why the last time I went to buy books, I decided to get them from Kobo . They don’t have everything Amazon does but they have a lot, and generally at the same price. You can buy a book and then download it. If it doesn’t have DRM, it’ll be in EPUB format. If it does, it’ll be in ACSM format. There’s a DeACSM plugin that will convert the latter to EPUB without DRM. There’s also a plugin called Obok that comes with DeDRM that’s supposed to do the same, but I think it requires you have Adobe Digital Editions on your computer? Which has no Linux version so I don’t. DeACSM works without ADE.
Either way you have an EPUB, and if you want to read that on a Kindle… well, you can send it to the Kindle via its email address, or via a Mac or Windows application, either of which (I’m pretty sure) converts it to MOBI, which Kindle can deal with. Or… just use Calibre to convert it to MOBI, and then load it to your Kindle via USB.
Or jailbreak your Kindle and use KOReader to read EPUBs.
(I’ll be honest, the original reason I jailbroke one of my Kindles was in hopes of getting rid of ads on the lock screen, but it turns out you still can’t do that. Or actually you can, even without jailbreaking: Connect via USB, turn on hidden files viewing, go into /system/.assets, and delete everything there — those are the ads. For maybe a day or so your Kindle will be ad free. Then it’ll download more and they’ll show up again.)
Comics, raw
A lot of the books I downloaded were comics. I removed the DRM, but Calibre doesn’t render comics entirely correctly. There are pages of solid black, distorted pages, stuff like that. But eventually I figured out Calibre can convert comics to HTMLZ. This produces a zip archive file, within which is a folder called images, within which are all the individual page images in jpeg format. Just view them in an image viewer application. Nice.
Nyaah
So there it is. Amazon can’t touch my books, I can convert them to other formats, I can get books from elsewhere that I can download after Wednesday, and I can read them on my Kindles. I pretty much don’t need the Kindle Store any more, unless there’s some book I really want that isn’t available elsewhere.