Amazon is giving customers yet another reason not to trust them with ebook purchases. Over the past couple days, social media and reddit is littered with reports of people getting locked out of their Amazon accounts, and consequently being unable to access their purchased ebooks on Kindles and Kindle apps because they get locked out too.
A lot of people think the lockouts were triggered by downloading free ebooks during Stuff Your Kindle Day, which Amazon was advertising on their website so it’s not like they shouldn’t have expected people to download a bunch of freebies.
Some people downloaded dozens of free ebooks so that probably set off Amazon’s radar for potential fraudulent purchases, but there are reports of people only downloading a few freebies and still getting locked out so who knows what’s really going on.
This highlights a serious problem with Amazon’s system and the way they insist on locking users into their proprietary platform. At any time they can take aways years or decades of purchased ebooks and other digital media at the drop of a hat for any reason they deem necessary.
You’d think that in these types of circumstances you’d still be able to access your purchased and download ebooks, but if your Kindle ereader or app is online and syncs with a locked out account, it will get locked out too. Keeping your Kindle offline is the only way to protect it from this kind of nonsense.
This is why people should always make backups of their purchased ebooks, especially when it comes to Kindle ebooks. Unfortunately Amazon is making that more difficult all the time. For example, the new Kindles for 2024 don’t support download and transfer so you can’t download your ebooks from Amazon’s website anymore unless you have an older model.
At this time there are a lot of reports of people getting their accounts back. Some had to contact support or send in bank statements to verify their recent purchases, and others have gotten their accounts unlocked by doing nothing. It seems to be a pretty big issue that Amazon is working through, but it sounds like the worst of it is over now. But it left a lot of people being uncomfortable with Amazon’s control over their ebook purchases, and some are afraid to download free ebooks now for fear of getting locked out.
At some point people are going to have to take a stand against Amazon and ebook publishers about the way ebook purchases are handled and how everything is crippled with DRM where the whole system is designed to screw over paying customers. DRM isn’t a deterrent to pirates in the slightest. It’s easily circumvented for those that want to get around it. All it does is lock in legitimate customers so these multi-billion dollar companies can control our purchasing habits and our data, and it needs to end.
This is what they call a “self-limiting career move”. They’ve doomed themselves. Their position as leading ebook seller will not survive the 2030s.
That’s why I never buy books at Amazon. Either DRM-FREE (from all our local book stores) or from Z-library. It’s publishers’ choice… If they only offer DRM, I’ll just download it. It’s up to them.