Ever since Amazon put a notice on their website about sunsetting the ability to download purchased Kindle ebooks outside of Kindle apps and Kindle ereaders, a false narrative has been spreading online that I keep seeing posted over and over again, and people need to know that it’s not true.
Amazon has done a lot of things to anger Kindle customers over the years, and there’s no question they do some shady things at times, but there’s zero evidence they’ve started deleting purchased ebooks from people’s accounts.
They did that one time back in 2009 with the 1984 incident and they got so much bad press from it they said that something like that would not happen again, and so far, it hasn’t. People ultimately got their copy of 1984 back, or a $30 credit.
Just because a product page for a book gets deleted doesn’t mean it will get deleted from your Kindle account, as many people seem to think. You still retain access to all the books you purchased, even the ones you got for free, regardless if they get removed from Amazon’s website or not at some point in the future for whatever reason.
In fact, while I was downloading my Kindle ebooks before the deadline, I noticed a few that led to an error page on Amazon’s website because they’re no longer available, but the ebooks still downloaded fine without any issue.
Some people are convinced that Amazon is going to start censoring books and removing books with controversial topics from their website. I even had to remove a few comments on this blog saying that Amazon is going to start deleting certain types of books from people’s accounts now that D&T is being taken down. That is simply not true, and people need to stop spreading misinformation like that.
Frankly, Amazon probably should start deleting some of the AI garbage and poorly-written slush that’s currently clogging up the Kindle store and making it harder and harder to find quality books by the few authors that actually know how to write well, but even if they did that you’d still be able to download whatever drivel you purchased before they took it down.
I think sometimes people get confused about certain titles not being available on Kindles. Not all of Amazon’s ebooks are compatible with E Ink Kindles (like some textbooks, for example), especially when it comes to the older models, so some books might not show up on Kindle ereaders because they aren’t compatible with that model. There’s nothing nefarious about it, and they say which models are supported on those product page under the “available on these devices” list, so it’s not hard to figure out.
Until there’s proof that Amazon has started deleting purchased books from people’s accounts, that narrative needs to stop. Don’t believe what you read online, especially when it comes to platforms like reddit and social media where any idiot can spread misinformation without consequences.
It’s not just the deleting of books that folks are getting wrong, a goodly number seem to have this idea that Amazon is EDITING their books willy nilly!
Now, where Amazon is the official publisher of record, it is possible that they could make content changes to books with author permission. But Amazon books are hardly the majority of books out there and they certainly DO NOT make any kind of editorial changes, whether content or formatting, to the books of OTHER publishers! They wouldn’t, because that’s big time lawsuit territory.
AUTHORS and PUBLISHERS can make changes to their ebooks, but most changes are likely to be minor corrections of typos, or other text fixes (like incorrect quotation marks, dialog that’s not starting on a new paragraph, etc…) or formatting issues. Sometimes cover changes, that’s pretty normal with publishers to switch up covers from time to time, especially if a book becomes a movie.
But to think Amazon edits any and all Kindle books at whim is ridiculous! Amazon DOES keep a tally of reports from customers of PROBLEMS with certain ebooks (typos, formatting), and if enough complaints are made, they tell the PUBLISHER to FIX the issues or risk having the book PULLED FROM THE STORE!
This is actually a good thing for the consumer, as in most cases, it leaves them with a better book experience.
Yes, there is always the possibility that a publisher might make a content change or cover change that the consumer might NOT like, but Amazon does allow you to keep auto-updates of your ebook library TURNED OFF.
At any rate, the total misinformation out there making Amazon out as an evil entity is getting crazy.
As a wise man once said, never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
A great number of books are not available to download and I found more of them using the scripts. The books are still available as physical copies but not as ebooks. Some have a new message saying “this book is not available for download in your country despite me previously owning it over a decade ago.
Multiple Steven Burst Novels
Robert Lynn Asprin’s MythAdventures series..
Random Piers Anthony novels breaking sets with 1-3 missing 4, 5-9, missing 10.
Some book called The Manipulated Man whose author shows up as gibberish characters.
And there’s more where the entry itself is just gone except for a file name that is 1kb in size and corresponds to a book that only shows up in a Google search and directs to reddit on the litrpg forum or royal road. And when I search for the authors’ names I get a dog page on Amazon. I’d completely forgotten these books. They might still be on my bricked kindle oasis (thanks Amazon’s firmware team)….
I think whether they have actually done it or not is irrelevant.
The point is that they reserve the right to do so, and if they do that, it is because they plan on doing it.
They do not reserve the right to remove access to a license you paid for; it would go against their terms of service (not unless you did something to invalidate those terms, which admittedly, is pretty vague).