Last week Amazon started allowing Kindle customers to download DRM-free Kindle ebooks in EPUB and sometimes PDF format for books that publishers and authors have enabled a DRM-free download option, but there are some obvious flaws with the system so far.
The biggest problem is the simple fact that Amazon gives no indication whatsoever of which ebooks are downloadable as EPUBs or PDFs before buying. At present, there’s no way to tell if a Kindle ebook will have that option or not.
How is the average customer supposed to know this new feature now exists? The only indication you get is on the Manage Your Content page at Amazon for books you’ve already purchased where it says this below certain books: “Download available in additional formats”.
There’s no help page that I can find explaining how any of this is supposed to work. I thought Amazon would at least add a new entry to the product details section for Kindle books that shows if they’re downloadable in other formats or not.
At the bottom of a book’s description it sometimes says the following: “At the Publisher’s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.” But that alone is not a guarantee a book will be downloadable as an EPUB or PDF because authors and publishers have to approve that first, especially on books published before December 9th, 2025 that have to have the option enabled manually on a book-by-book basis.
Another thing that’s unclear about this new process is how returns work. Normally you have up to 7 days to return a purchased Kindle ebook, but is that still the case if you download a DRM-free copy before then? There’s no mention of that on Amazon’s Kindle Book Return page. They really shouldn’t allow returns if you download a DRM-free EPUB, but then again what if the formatting on that EPUB is a total mess?
Hopefully Amazon will add a way for customers to know which ebooks are downloadable as EPUBs and PDFs in the near future because the current setup isn’t helping much at all. It would also be nice if they added a filter option to the Manage Your Content page to easily find downloadable titles because now the only way is to visually check each and every ebook on the list to see if it says downloads are available.
Of the few e-books I have purchased on Amazon (about 150), only two had the option to download them: one as a PDF and the other as a .zip file (which I renamed to .epub) that read well on my DRM-free reading programmes.
Personally, I don’t think it’s worth downloading them. I find it more convenient to read them directly on a Kindle, to be honest. But I think it’s good that this option exists, better organised as you suggest, if it can be useful to someone.