Now that Amazon has ended support for the first five generations of Kindles, some people are finding out that Amazon is still counting the ebook licenses for books downloaded to those Kindles against the total, and Amazon gives no explanation on how to get that license back.
Most Kindle ebooks have a license limit of six simultaneous downloads per copy, meaning you can download a book to six different Kindle devices and apps. Once you hit the limit, you have to delete the book from one of your devices or apps before you can download it to another Kindle or Kindle app (FYI, ebooks with Adobe DRM are limited to 6 devices as well).
Amazon still shows if you have specific ebooks downloaded to unsupported Kindles from the Manage Your Content page, but the option to remove books from older Kindles is greyed out. Plus the option to deregister unsupported Kindles from Amazon’s website no longer exists anymore so you can’t get those ebook licenses back that way either.
Amazon neglected to mention any of this on their unsupported Kindles help page or in the emails they sent out, so nobody was expecting this to be a problem. If they would’ve said this would happen people could have avoided losing their Kindle ebook licenses before the cutoff date. Maybe Amazon has a solution for this that they just aren’t disclosing publicly, but nobody really knows what’s going on at this point.
How to Get Kindle eBook Licenses Back
Option #1. Some people are reporting they were able to get the license back by deleting the book from their old Kindle and then syncing, and that removed the old Kindle from the book’s downloaded list, thus restoring the license limit.
I don’t know how that works when older Kindles are supposed to be disconnected from Amazon’s servers now, but for the time being it’s still working for some. Be careful though, because once you delete an ebook from an old Kindle you can’t get it back on there again without DeDRMing and sideloading.
Option #2. Another person is reporting they were able to get their old Kindle to drop off the list simply by downloading the books to six other devices and apps. So maybe Amazon has a plan for this, after all. But there are conflicting reports on this so it’s unclear if this works for all accounts/books.
Option #3. Contact Amazon’s customer service via chat and ask them to remove the old Kindle from your account. Even though old Kindles are now unsupported, they still show up on your registered Kindles list at Amazon. Once they are removed, ebook licenses can no longer be tied to them.
If you try any of these methods, please leave a comment saying if it worked or not.
via: MobileRead
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