Montana Ebook Worms: Hurry, Do This Before You Can’t

If you're a big fan of ebooks in Montana, especially if you have an extensive library you've purchased over the years for your Amazon Kindle time is running out for you to take a step you may regret not doing while you still could.

To be clear, you're going to lose access to your volumes.

But the opportunity to have a backup copy of all those books is disappearing this week.

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What's happening to Kindle downloads?

The feature that's being turned off actually dates back to the earliest days of the Amazon Kindle, which was first available back in 2007.

In those days, the included wifi connections were still not ubiquitous, or many readers wanted to be able to download independently from having a network connection. Ever since then, there was an option to download your books, and then upload to the Kindle over USB.

Then, Kindle announced recently that the download option was being turned off on February 26th according to a story in The Verge. 

What does that mean?

It doesn't mean you'll lose your books. However, you won't have the option to have a backup copy of the books you own. That could be a problem in the future if you get rid of your Kindle, or if you have a particular book that might be available from Amazon in the future.

I'm especially interested in going to the effort because of all the older, out-of-print historical books I'd like to preserve.

And in a rural state like Montana, that could even be problematic if you live where Internet access is sketchy.

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Only days left to download Kindle books

Downloading copies of the books you own is easy, but time-consuming.

You need to go to "Device Management" on the Amazon website, which can be found under the Kindle menu, and then "Manage Your Content and Devices" at the bottom of that menu.

That takes you to a list of all your ebooks, and on the right under "More actions", you'll find the pull-down menu which says "Download and transfer via USB." When you click there, the next option allows you to pick your Kindle device. The book doesn't go on the Kindle. That's just to verify your ownership to the title.

From there, you can download the title to your Mac or PC. In my case, I'm also using the option to make sure I have a cloud backup of my titles.

It takes time to go through the whole list. But the files are small. I have nearly 300 books downloaded in less than 500 MB. The files are in the older "azw3" format, which doesn't include all the modern options for margins, etc. There are also lots of conversion programs to access those files should you need to in the future.