Amazon Kindle removes download feature of purchased books

The Amazon Kindle website says that starting from February 26 2025, you can no longer download your purchased e-books from Amazon's website to your computer using the "download and transfer via USB" feature. A warning describing this change appears on the page for the download feature.

Background

Amazon allows purchasing e-books on their platform, and with their download and transfer feature it allows users to locally store purchased e-books on your computer as a backup. It also enables customers that bought e-books from Amazon to convert them to other formats and read them on other e-readers (although this sometimes requires removing DRM first).

Amazon Kindle e-readers use a proprietary format, while many other e-readers use the more open EPUB format so users have to convert e-books in their Kindle library to use them with other devices. Also, newer Kindles use the KFX format, which makes it almost impossible to remove DRM. This means that people with newer Kindles have to use download and transfer to download the e-books in the older AZW3 format.

Without the feature to download your purchased e-books, customers are restricted from moving from Amazon to another e-book platform, since they wouldn't be able to keep the e-books they purchased on Amazon.

Removal of download and transfer via USB

The removal of the download feature retroactively changes customers' e-book purchases through the Amazon Kindle platform. This platform is subject to the terms Amazon sets, which can be amended at any time. For instance, Amazon previously removed books customers had purchased since the company that uploaded them didn't have the rights to the content. An important side note is that it is still possible to download e-books to the device, but it will require an internet connection on the e-reader, which previously wasn't the case.

Implications for consumers

This change has several implications for Kindle customers:

• This new policy makes it much harder to read purchased e-books on devices other than Kindle e-readers
• This new policy requires customers to have an internet connection on the e-reader to download books they purchase through the Kindle platform

After the announcement, many consumers have downloaded their purchased e-books with the download and transfer feature while it is still possible. Many people are also moving to other providers to buy e-books going forward.