Dark clouds

Your Kindle books have never belonged to you. Regardless of whether the button literally said “Buy Now” when you downloaded The Da Vinci Code, you never became the actual owner of it. In terms of ownership, the astute readers of fine print realised long ago that Amazon’s Kindle Store was only ever a Netflix or Spotify subscription model without the monthly payments. Most people are still yet to realise.

Maybe you knew all this and don’t really care. Ben Sixsmith has written previously about the problems faced by keeping all your books in the cloud: “you might go looking for a copy of a book … and find that it is quite different to how you remembered it”. Amazon can change, suspend, discontinue, and remove any digital content from the Kindle store at any time without notice, according to their Terms of Service. For the odd author who wants to correct a typo I don’t care, and for my favourite books who have their covers changed for a new film adaptation I’m only slightly annoyed. But for the words themselves to be swapped without my knowledge, for the work to be fundamentally different, I am seething. I imagine so are you.

This happened recently when The Roald Dahl Story Company released revised censored versions of Dahl’s novels, and readers who bought previous versions of these classics discovered they had been forcibly updated. The Roald Dahl Story Company can release as many new versions as it likes (and Amazon can only update the e-books with the company’s permission) but it is crucial consumers are free to choose which version they get to read, to choose which version their children read, and that they get to keep the one they have chosen.

Again this is nothing new, this kind of crackdown was coined “Enshittification” in 2022

Yet amongst the more-than-slightly dystopian setup, there is a way to keep your books for good. Remember that thing we used to do before cloud computing? The ability to download e-books onto a USB or computer kept them forever out of reach from hidden hands correcting a typo here, censoring fatphobia there, or banning them outright.

This ability, predictably, is being quietly removed. For those who have downloaded their Kindle books in the past but wondered why they can’t open or read the files, it’s because Amazon uses DRM or Digital Rights Management software to prevent piracy. Don’t worry, removing DRM converting the book into EPUB or PDF format is legal, and necessary to actually read the backup copy. While removing the DRM violates Amazon’s terms of service, local law overrules. For those here in the UK, downloading and format shifting a backup copy for personal use is in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Section 2B, so long as you do not share, sell or use it for anything “directly nor indirectly commercial”. If Amazon somehow found out, and really cared, they could lock your account and or delete your library, although it wouldn’t entirely matter at that point.

Amazon has been dominating the publishing industry for years: A US government investigation reported Amazon accounts for over half of all print book sales including 90 per cent of online print sales, 83 per cent of all e-book sales, and about 90 per cent of digital audiobook sales in the US market. And so their recent surreptitious manoeuvre has for many become the last straw. As much as Amazon has successfully stifled competition, it seems, anecdotally at least, e-reader companies such as Kobo are seeing people swap to their devices. Amazon’s profit-fixated decision was not designed to deliver a good product or service but to further trap users into their ecosystem.

Again this is nothing new, this kind of crackdown was coined “Enshittification” in 2022: Online products and services decline in quality over time, features are clawed back, purchases must be purchased again, all because big tech monopolies have realised that this exploitation is more profitable and predictable than innovation. I am all for free market capitalism, I am not all for manipulative monopolies in the digital age. Amazon are not only suffocating the publishing world they are now seeking to control the flow of information to readers, the implication of potential “day-to-day falsification of the past” is unmistakable. E-book piracy will undoubtedly start to rise, hurting traditional publishing houses and struggling writers more than Amazon itself, as people seek means of circumventing predatory monopolistic practices in order to actually own their books and feebly get back at Amazon.

So get your head out of the clouds! Download your books while you still can! You have until  26 February. Think some more about from where and whom you buy e-books, and maybe look for an alternative e-reader company that doesn’t base its business-model on feudal practices even Medieval peasants wouldn’t have put up with. Or maybe, you know, buy a paper book.