IIUC this is currently true and would not be affected by the announced change.
I haven’t studied the issue in any detail, but it looks to me as though there are three kinds of people who would be impacted by this change:
People who want to back up the Kindle books they’ve bought from Amazon on their PCs, because they don’t trust Amazon to keep them available in perpetuity. (Whether or not this is a reasonable fear could be a subject for discussion.)
People who want to be able to read Kindle books they’ve bought from Amazon on some other app or device that is not approved by Amazon. (I’ve never had any problems using Amazon’s Kindle app, but if I did, I might want the option of an alternative.)
People who want to download their Kindle books and distribute them to other people (which would presumably be in violation of copyright).
You should be able to set your Kindle (either device or app) to show either All your content or just what you’ve Downloaded onto that particular device.
You may also be able to change a setting so that any new ebooks you buy either do or do not get automatically delivered to one or more of your devices.
I do have it set to All on my devices. I first noticed a change in delivery when I bought a book, it never showed up in the All listing, and I had to go to the website and check the box for Deliver to get it. So now I just go to Content and Devices and select the Deliver option right after every purchase.
Weird. I haven’t had that issue. It may be something in your settings somewhere, but I assume that if it were something obvious you’d have figured it out.
Does anyone know if the Kindle desktop app will still work?
I’ve always downloaded my Amazon books that way and backed them up into Calibre. If I can’t do that any more, I’m going back to Barnes and Noble (and other suppliers where possible).
But the next time you connect to the web with that device, Amazon could in theory remove or alter stuff you’ve already downloaded.
I don’t have a kindle. I do my ereading on an iPad. But at some point they made the book sync via iTunes not an option. I was incensed at the time. I got used to it eventually and now when I get a book, I just pop it in my dropbox and export it to my reading app. So people who are comfortable with tech, you get used to it and now I kind of like it better than having to pop open resource-hog iTunes just for synching. However, not everyone is good with folders and extra apps and I didn’t have a huge iTunes-purchased library to worry about.
I checked and I have just under 1300 books on my Amazon “Content and Devices”. I also have a lot of e-books which I have purchased or otherwise obtained from non-Amazon sources. Many of these had been sent to my Kindle using a now apparently defunct “send to Kindle” program, and some by emailing them to my Kindle. All of the books that I had not purchased from Amazon I have stored on an external drive, so I should be able to re-send them to my Kindle at any time. Right?
“Send to Kindle” still works, but not for the mobi file format. Amazon abandoned that about two years ago and switched to epub as the generic file format. Mobi files in your library that were added before should still be readable, at least they told me so in an email.
Right; you should still be able to send them to your Kindle by emailing, or using the “Send To Kindle” function that @StGermain linked to upthread, or copying them over via a USB cable. Although if you’ve already sent them once, they may already be in your Amazon “library” and you could just re-download them.
One complication: only certain file formats are sendable. (EPUB is, but some of the formats that Kindle used to like, like MOBI or AZW, are apparently not.) If your ebooks are in those formats, you may need to convert them (using Calibre or some other utility) before sending them.
A lot of the books I have saved on my hard drive are in MOBI because that was the format Kindle used when I got them. However, when Amazon announced they were going to be discontinuing MOBI (2023?) I started making sure that I got books in EPUB instead. Also, I have a lot of the older books in both MOBI and EPUB, since my source offered them in both (and in some cases, also PDF).
I was forced to update my version of Kindle for PC to download using that - that was how I always downloaded stuff before, to get it into Calibre.
And those versions of the files could no longer be opened in Calibre - older Kindle-sourced books could be (especially after taking some… steps).
I went through my library and everything for the past 18 months was not yet in Calibre, so I had to download each one, one at a time. Then I imported them into Calibre (AZW format, I think), and was able to convert them to ePub, so I know it succeeded.
We should still be able to DOWNLOAD the files, using the Kindle for PC app. And I think we’ll even still be able to copy them into Calibre, and perhaps use that to sideload them to the Kindle, but I’m not entirely sure the Kindle will be able to open them.
Books downloaded via the PC app now come with about 5-6 different files. I don’t know how all that would work now.
I plan to solve the problem by not giving Amazon any more of my ebook money. There are plenty of other sources. Too risky - if Amazon decides they don’t like me, they could essentially deactivate my account and make all my books unreadable.