Public Service Announcement: Back up your e-books!

[mdlbear]

TL;DR: After February 26th, you will no longer be able to download books to your computer from that bookseller named after a river in Brazil. That means that you will not be able to back up your library to, say, a hard drive, or convert your books to a format you can read somewhere else.

Either of those would be a non-problem for people -- like me, until yesterday -- who only read books on their kindle, or the kindle app on their phone, and are comfortable with trusting $A to keep their books safely stored in the cloud. BUT, as pointed out in this article on Good E-Reader, they can no longer be trusted. They have been known to remove books from their store, and from the libraries of everyone who "bought" them, without notice, recourse, or recompense. They have also silently replaced books with modified (censored) versions.

You have until Tuesday the 25th to download your books.

After that you'll be able to sideload them onto a Kindle via USB, or use Calibre to remove the DRM and convert them to more portable ebook formats.

You can download books up to 25 at a time by putting them in collections. Not fun, if you have lots of books. Colleen and I had over 1000 between us. There is a bulk downloader: bellisk/BulkKindleUSBDownloader: Quick script to download all your Kindle ebooks. It's in Python and should be portable; the requirements can be installed with pip. It also needs Chromium. (Or Chrome, but you really don't want that.)

Good luck and happy hacking.

ETA: Claim Your Free COVID-19 Tests Now in Case the USPS Program Gets Shut Down - CNET

Comments

[robinthefiddler]

I tried. It wouldn’t let me download unless I had the kindle app, (used to, but it may not have survived an estimated dozen OS upgrades) tried to get the kindle app, thought it wanted my Amazon password, probably locked out Fred’s Apple password. Messed up my Apple password and decided I’d better stop before I locked that out, too.

[mdlbear]

Yeah; you need either a kindle or a device with an app that's registered to your account. Go to "manage devices" and see what's there. Note that it doesn't have to actually exist -- it could be a kindle that you've lost or thrown away. (I have no idea what happened to Colleen's kindle, but it let me use its ID to download her books with.) The books you download are locked using the device's serial number, but the bulk downloader prints that out for you at the end of the run. There's also a way to get it from the website.

Good luck!

[gorgeousgary]

Thanks for the heads up! Not the best timing to scramble and download, but I only have 275 items, mostly comics bought from Comixology before Amazon acquired them. I've always tended to focus on non-DRM sources (eBooks.com, Subterranean Press, Humble Bundles) for ebook purchases. I will have to go figure out Calibre.