Kindle Konfusion

I guess it’s time to go old school again, with just some notes and no massive Notion document as a guide. And why not, given that the topic is somewhat more off-the-cuff than usual. You see, a few weeks ago, my YouTube home page suddenly got inundated with videos of creators I’d never seen before shouting to the heavens that they were going to quit Amazon because it was blocking them from downloading their Kindle ebooks. 

Say what now?

I waited a bit for the hyperbole to die down before finally watching a video with a somewhat more sane take over on Nebula. Apparently, Amazon had decided to retire a feature that had allowed Kindle customers to download copies of their ebooks to their PC or Mac in order to later transfer them to their Kindle via USB. Huh. I’d never even realized that such a featured had existed, it hadn’t really been communicated that this was an option and the feature had been buried deep in Amazon’s already overloaded homepage.

However, as is the case so often in this outrage driven social media age, the outcry was vociferous and hyperbolic. You suddenly saw statements such as “Amazon is stealing your ebooks”, “Your Kindle is useless now” or “No more downloading books”, all of which were at best completely over the top and more often downright wrong. You could, and can, still download your purchases onto your Kindle, you can still use your Kindle offline, and you still retain your purchases. All that was taken down was one niche feature, one that, as it turned out, had been used by many of these content creators as a way to remove Amazon’s DRM protection from their ebooks to get them onto other e-readers. 

If anything, this Shakespearean outcry in the tradition of “Much Ado about Nothing” has shown just how disconnected many users were from the reality of the Kindle platform. Quite frankly, it is *not* open, and it hasn’t been since 2008, when the first Kindle came out. And I’m not even sure that it’s all purely Amazon’s doing either. Publishers have always taken a dim view to books, including physical ones, being shared and have not been above trying to throttle this by any means possible, only grudgingly tolerating even public libraries. I’ve seen more than one attempt by major publishing houses or associations to try to kill even charity 2nd hand book fairs. If Amazon had gone ahead and launched an open sharing platform with the first generation Kindle back in 2008, they’d have been torn to pieces. With this background, as much as I hate the principle of DRM, it is quite simply ludicrous to expect to take a book purchased for one particular ecosystem and just store or upload it wherever you want.

Kindle is an amazing platform, both for readers and for authors, allowing for a massive library to fit into your pocket, and for authors to self-publish without having to rely on the bureaucratic rigamarole of a large publishing house. The Kindle Effect, an increased desire to read triggered by having an e-reader, is real, and I’m now reading more than I have in a long time. However, it is still very much a commercial product, one operating in a challenging environment under a lot of pressure not just from shareholders but also from other very powerful interest groups. It stands to reason that any company operating in such a field will want to protect itself and its ecosystem, whether we like it or not. Naturally, it is up to each and every user whether such efforts outweigh the benefits of the Kindle ecosystem. There’s something to be said for taking a deep breath and sleeping things over however, and it seems a lot of Kindle users would do well to take that lesson to heart.