The Kindle Swindle

You have already heard, I hope, about the changes that Amazon is bringing to Kindle content on Feb 26 2025. In brief, you will no longer be able to download e-books you have bought from Amazon to your computer. The only way to read those books will be via Kindle apps — on your computer or a wireless device.

On the surface this doesn’t sound like much . Downloading ebooks to your computer was clunky and only really necessary if you couldn’t connect your device to WiFi.

But. And it’s a bigger but the more you think about it.

Possessing the actual file for the book provided the only defence against Amazon deleting or amending the book remotely. Also it is the only way you can load a Kindle book onto your Kindle if it’s an earlier version of the reader, or if the WiFi chip in the device doesn’t work.

But more crucially it was the only way to keep the books you had bought should you close your Amazon account, or want to read the book on a non-Kindle device or Kindle app.

In other words: actually having the book file in your possession was the only certainty you had that you actually owned the ebook in question. Once it’s on your computer, or on a Kindle device that doesn’t connect to the Internet.

Amazon hasn’t said why it’s doing this, and it hasn’t made any big announcement about it that I’m aware of. It definitely feels sneaky, and the only reason they are doing this that I can think of is to prevent circulation online of pirated ebooks. In 2022 nearly a quarter of ebooks consumed in the UK were pirated, roughly the same proportion as music, film and ebooks. (Source: Online copyright infringement tracker survey) (It might also be an effort to force those of us who are quite happy with earlier versions of Kindle ereaders to upgrade.)

I have downloaded all my Kindle content just in case, and I believe you should too. The manner of this change is as alarming as the actual change itself, though we can’t be sure there isn’t something more involved.

Books were the first useful ecommerce market, and Jeff Bezos was clever in spotting that. But when it came to digital books, they lagged the digitalisation of music by nearly a decade. Is it about to catch up?

Digital music started off as mostly as ripped CDs, and then music stores like iTunes. A few years the market met an existential threat in the form of pirated digital music, where everyone seemed to be doing it. The industry — though not necessarily the musicians — was saved by streaming, where one company succeeded in persuading record companies to license their library for what was a prettty steep discount on what they hoped to make by digital music sales.

I believe that Amazon hopes this is what will happen to books. We won’t own books, we will borrow them for a monthly subscription. This is already the case for ‘Kindle Unlimited’, which could no longer be downloaded at some point last year (convincing me that piracy is behind these moves. If DRM could be broken on Kindle Unlimited files, it would have allowed users to download and pirate vast numbers of books.)

It makes sense from Amazon’s point of view to try to switch us over to a Spotify-like (sorry, Amazon Music-like) subscription. Indeed, in some ways it makes more sense to readers too: most of us read a book once, and while it’s nice to have physical books around us, for the most part they lie unread. Nice folk give them away to charity, lend them to friends, or sell them online. Amazon has stopped us doing anything like this with ebooks, and so I suspect the only thing holding back a much larger piracy market is that removing DRM from ebooks is too fiddly for most.

So it’s no surprise that Amazon might try to shift books to the same model as TV and music. The problem will be convincing publishers. They are probably not too bothered by piracy so long as prices for ebooks remain high. A decade ago Penguin Random House thought an “eat everything you want” wasn’t what punters wanted, but that’s not what this is about. It’s converting a public library into an online library. Users would download a book, read it and then maybe save some notes before returning it. So long as they know that they can access it again at some point, I don’t think they’ll be all that bothered.

But it does leave extraordinary power in the hands of the platform — the websites for accessing that content, and the apps or devices on which that content is consumed. I can’t imagine Amazon wanting to let go any of that. So once a few publishers agree, the rest will have to follow. The people paying for this will be the user, who will have yet another subscription service to pay for, and the authors themselves, who I’m sure will be nickel-and-dimed by the publisher. Instead of a windfall from initial sales, they’ll see royalty checks that are worth more in paper than the amount they represent.

So treat this as the first salvo in a new campaign by Amazon to convert the publishing industry to another dreaded subscription model. If we want to read a digital book, we’ll probably have to sign up for a service, just as with Apple we can’t just buy Slow Horses and watch it, we have to subscribe to Apple+.

Or, of course, we could wander down to our bookshop and buy a hard copy, and keep it forever. Or give it to a friend.

You’ve still got a few days. Download your Kindle books, and while you’re doing so, calibre.