Ebook Readers Up In Arms Over This Change To Kindle
You've got less than a week to backup your books
In under a week, Amazon is removing the ability to download your ebooks from the content management section of the site. This means that any Kindle books you buy are stuck in the Amazon ecosystem.
There are two things at play here we should address:
as far as I know, you’ll still be able to send non-Amazon ebooks as epubs to your Kindle, so you can buy them outside of the Amazon store and still read them on your Kindle
how confident are you in betting on the future of Amazon and the books that you buy digital copies of?
This is obviously a big concern and “what if” for many readers who take pride in book ownership and want to keep copies of their books for their digital library.
What buying Kindle books really means
Buying a Kindle is buying into Amazon’s ecosystem. If you look at it this way, the change is not as concerning. Sure the device costs a lot compared to a physical book, but then each ebook is about half the price of the physical copy and every month you’ll find tons of popular books on sale for $0.99. So even within a few months, if you read regularly, the device has paid for itself and you’ll continue to save money with every subsequent book.
Compare this to the rise of streaming music
People were concerned when Apple switched from buying music to a subscription model so you never owned the music anymore but then everyone got used to it or moved away from the platform.
And I think just like pirating music is a big problem, pirating books affects authors big time too and I imagine that has something to do with why Amazon doesn’t want you to be able to strip the DRM from the books and share them anywhere.
Anyone who doesn’t see the problem in this is probably more of a consumer than a creator. It takes an incredible amount of hard work and time to produce a great book and as we continue to transition to a more digital world, authors shouldn’t have to worry about their ability to earn a living evaporating with pirated content.
Here’s how I’ve been looking at digital books for a while now:
As a way to acquire new information, highlights then go to readwise where they will still be stored and moved to a personal knowledge management system like Notion. Even if you didn’t have the book anymore, you’d have the important points that were meaningful to you.
Digital books are a way to relax and read fiction and pick out which books I want physical copies of for my library.
There are far too many books out there that we’ll never get around to reading. If e-readers and Kindle books help you to read better, easier, and more, then that’s a great bargain and tradeoff even if you’re renting instead of buying the books.
Does this really matter to you?
Consider this: I know there are some audiophiles out there who still buy albums and music but nobody I know balks at using Spotify or Apple Music and nobody owns their own music anymore.
The same goes for movies. With Netflix, Amazon, and all these streaming platforms we have mostly forgotten about owning movies and box sets of TV shows.
If you’re one of the people who likes to have these collections and takes pride in the ownership of your digital book collection, go all in on transitioning away from Amazon or downloading all of your books before the deadline next week.
But for me, I’m not too worried about it. The books that are worth re-reading I buy physical copies of. As I talked about in a recent video, there are far too many books to read in the time that we have and we should get better at not finishing mediocre books.
As for Kindles versus Kobo
I’m still very happy with the paperwhite that I got a couple of years ago. It works perfectly, I can send newsletters, epubs, and PDFs to it to read as well as books I buy on Amazon. So I’m happy with using it.
I originally switched away from Kobo around 10 years ago because I found the devices to be unreliable and I didn’t like the reading app as much as Apple Books or Kindle’s app. So my relationship with Kobo was soured but I’m sure they’ve fixed many of the bugs and crashing problems that were more common when e-readers were still relatively new.
When the time comes to replace this Kindle I may consider looking at different devices like the Kobo this time.