On February 26, Amazon is removing your right to download Kindle books.
If you download yours, Calibre under linux will allow you to read them. I was amazed to find I had purchased 51 Kindle ebooks over the years, and what a pain it is to download them manually! It seems to me that Amazon has made this process as tedious as possible.
If you have 1000 ebooks like many, then it sucks to be you. If you can create Android apps really fast, perhaps an App to automate the Kindle downloads could be a way to make some serious money ?
Wow, thank you for posting this! I had no idea this was changing and am not sure if it was recently and quietly announced, or whether it just passed me by. Either way, I’m facing the prospect of 450+ downloads. Another unfortunate example of services getting worse and the pitfalls of digital “ownership” overall.
This coverage on Hackaday links to a project on GitHub with an auto downloader, but I haven’t reviewed it closely to see whether I’m comfortable putting my Amazon credentials and 2FA code into there. I’ll have to have a look into any available automated download options or spend a lot of time clicking and waiting over the next few days!
These are ‘interesting’ times and one should be aware of the manifold dangers in the brave new digital world.
I’m not worried that book burning will be digital, but that bank accounts can be as easily deleted as books.
That’s the best pro Bitcoin/gold bullion argument I can think of.
One of my favorite scifi books is John Brunners “Shockwave Rider” which Deepseek-r1:b14 knows all about:
John Brunner’s Shockwave Rider is a compelling blend of science fiction, cybernetics, and societal critique. The novel centers around a protagonist who possesses an advanced neural interface, enabling direct interaction with computers and networks in powerful yet perilous ways. This technology serves as a gateway to “the Grid,” a matrix-like system where reality and virtuality intertwine, blurring the lines between the two.
Ah JD watch out for the firemen in Fahrenheit 451.
I had an interesting afternoon with Perplexity, where she and I had a go at getting Belfry’s treetrum suggestion to work. (I’m not anthropomorphising am I?)
We failed to get docker working despite rebuilding the Dockerfile and index.ts on multiple occasions. We nearly made it but fell at the final hurdle of using chromium (headless) to authenticate to Amazon.
We did however succeed in running bun at the command line with
bun run start --manualAuth
but it then failed because I do not have a kindle (I have been using kobo for the last 12 months) and the script depends on that.
I think the only future solution is follow Cory Doctorow’s advice and only get books that can ultimately be made DRM free.
To paraphrase the bitcoiners:- “Not my DRM free epub, not my ebook”.
