In February of this year, I came across this article from The Verge, called: “Amazon’s killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books“.
Effectively, this article reports that after February 26th, you can only download books from the Kindle store to your Kindle device over Wi-Fi. This means that ebooks you purchased can no longer be downloaded and converted into an epub format to be consumed by another e-reader like Apple’s Books.app, which I normally do on my iPad or iPhone.
Of course, this policy change poses an immediate problem for me when consuming or reading my ebooks. However, it also in my view crosses an ethical boundary. Digital media such as ebooks, which you have paid full prices for, is no longer yours. The buyer of such content is at the mercy of the distribution platform, in this case Amazon. This simply does not sit well with me. In the past, Amazon has also been known to remove purchased content due to changes in distribution rights, which is normally outside of the buyer’s control.
I now have to adopt a new process that I will use whenever I buy ebooks from the Kindle platform. I will describe this process in detail below so that in the future should I need to refer to it, it is here.
This process will remove the Digital Rights Management from the ebook that you just purchased and allows us to store a DRM-free ebook in Calibre, an ebook management software. This process will only work on Windows, so I had to spin up a Windows virtual machine for this purpose.
Software required:
- Calibre (use the link to download the software for Windows);
- DeDRM plugin (use the link to download the zip file);
- KFX Input plugin (use the Calibre Preferences & Plugins to search);
- Install the above Calibre plugins with the Preferences –> Plugins management;
- Kindle for PC (must be version 2.4.0 (70904));
Use Kindle for PC to browse and access the ebooks that have been purchased from Amazon, and download the ebook you would like to convert.
Use Calibre and its Add books functionality to import the azw file from the My Kindle Content. See Figure 1 for details.
Once the book has been imported, Calibre should have a KFX format of the book. We need to convert it to the epub format for other reader devices using Calibre’s Convert books functionality.
I then move the epub formatted ebook onto my macOS Calibre version for long term storage and management.