Hey!
This is a bit different, writing to everyone on a Tuesday. :-)
But I wanted to share something, in case you haven’t seen it elsewhere.
Starting on February 26th, 2025, Amazon is removing a feature from its website allowing you to download purchased books to a computer and then copy them manually to a Kindle over USB. {The Verge}
Many people probably don’t use this feature at the moment, but it kinda removes your ownership of the ebooks you have bought from Amazon. Which is bad enough in itself.
In the past, Amazon have removed ebooks from Kindle for various reasons (see the article on The Verge I linked above). Maybe the examples are not too worrying, but considering how chummy Bezos is with the current US administration, I think there is cause for concern.
If books can be easily removed, what’s to stop them removing books that do not conform to their ideologies?
We have already seen how references to women, people of colour, and transgender people are being removed from government websites and monuments. And books are being removed from school libraries and curricula.
What’s to stop Amazon from quietly start removing books written by, or about, these groups of people? Or perhaps altering them slightly? I would not put it past them.
So if there are Kindle books that you would like a ‘physical’ copy of, make sure you download them before February 26th. The Verge article I linked to above also has instructions for how to download the Kindle books.
If you actually can download them. I was going to make screenshots of the process but for some reason I am not able to download my Kindle books. And I can’t figure out why!
I have a Kindle app on two different devices and on my computer. But I get this message when I try to download a book. Weird. Maybe it’s because I only use apps, I don’t have an actual Kindle.
I think it’s time to move away from Kindle, and Amazon in general. I have started downloading my Amazon music purchases and I’m going to see about downloading my Audible books as well.
It’s a shame that ebooks are not available from bookshop.org in the UK yet. If you have recommendations for replacements, both for Kindle and the other…services, please leave a comment.
Ugh.
Why can’t we have nice things that aren’t soiled by the grubby hands of tech bro billionaires?
Alright, that’s it from me today. I’m going to go tidy my studio and maybe go for a walk in the sunshine. :-)
Thank you for reading. x Carina
P.S. We should of course all use the library! Most of them offer ebooks, too! :-)