It’s time to start backing up your purchased Kindle ebooks if you haven’t already. It looks like Amazon intends to remove the Download & Transfer via USB option from their website for Kindle ebooks as of February 26th.
Over on reddit, some people are saying they’ve been greeted by a new prompt when trying to download Kindle ebooks from Amazon’s website that says the following:
Starting February 26, 2025, the “Download & Transfer via USB” option will no longer be available. You can still send Kindle books to your Wi-Fi enabled devices by selecting the “Deliver or Remove from Device” option.
So far all the reports seem to be for US accounts, but I’m still not seeing that message when I try to download ebooks from the Digital Content page at Amazon, but it didn’t stop me from downloading several dozen of my purchased ebooks to have on my computer just in case.
At this point it’s still unclear if this is only going to apply to certain Kindle models, or if Amazon is getting rid of D&T across the board for all Kindles and all accounts. They already did away with D&T on the newer Kindles that were released in 2024, so I guess we should’ve seen this coming.
Even if D&T goes away entirely, you should still be able to get your purchased ebooks off of older Kindles for backup and DRM removal, provided the Kindle is old enough to have ebooks downloaded in the older AZW3 format instead of the newer KFX format (it’s harder to remove DRM from KFX).
Most people don’t use D&T or care about backing up their ebooks and removing the DRM, so this isn’t going to be a problem for everyone. In general, it’s a good idea to backup ebook purchases, as many ebook stores have gone under over the years, but Amazon certainly isn’t going be closing shop anytime soon. Still, it’s a good idea to have backups in case you ever want to move away from Amazon/Kindles in the future.
This is going to be more of an issue for people that buy Kindle ebooks to read on other brands of devices like Kobos. It will make removing ebook DRM harder unless you have an older Kindle laying around that you can pull the ebooks off of.
It’s surprising how many people are completely clueless about what download and transfer even means. On reddit, people are asking all kinds of irrelevant questions that don’t have anything to do with D&T whatsoever. Yes, Calibre will still work. No, it’s not going to affect side loading. Yes, you’ll still be able to use Send to Kindle. Yes, you’ll still be able to download your ebooks over WiFi to Kindles and Kindle apps.
D&T was originally put in place for people that didn’t have WiFi to download ebooks and needed to sideload them via USB, and now it’s mostly used by people that want to remove the DRM from purchased Kindle ebooks so they aren’t locked into Amazon’s ecosystem. This is going to outrage some people, but it’s really not going affect the vast majority of Kindle users that don’t care about DRM removal and being able to read Kindle ebooks on non-Kindle devices.
