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by blakeburch 485 days ago
This is... terrible news. This is primarily how I get books from the library. I found that if you keep the Kindle on Airplane mode and download + transfer them, they never expire.

Nothing malicious. I just can't read books arbitrarily in a 21 day period.
2 comments
dmd 485 days ago
This will not affect you at all. They're not stopping allowing you to transfer books to your kindle over USB. They're stopping letting you download book files from Amazon.
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blakeburch 485 days ago
From what the article says, that's doesn't appear to be true.

In order to download and transfer Kindle books from the Library, I have to first add them to "My Content" on Amazon, then from the Amazon interface click "Download & Transfer via USB". That's the only way to access the AZW3 files that get moved over to the Kindle.

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dmd 485 days ago
Oh, sorry. Didn’t realize you meant your kindle library. I thought you were talking about borrowing ebooks from your public library.
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blakeburch 485 days ago
I was! Responded in a comment below. The public library serves the digital books directly through Amazon.

Either I'm missing something more obvious or the system I've seen libraries use for digital books over the past 10 years is more uncommon than I realized.

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dmd 485 days ago
Oh. That’s bizarre. Never heard of that. Certainly not how any library I’ve used does it.
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amazingamazing 485 days ago
This has nothing to do what your use case since you get the books from the library.
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blakeburch 485 days ago
From what the article says, that's doesn't appear to be true.

In order to download and transfer Kindle books from the Library, I have to first add them to "My Content" on Amazon, then from the Amazon interface click "Download & Transfer via USB". That's the only way to access the AZW3 files that get moved over to the Kindle.

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amazingamazing 485 days ago
Are you talking about the amazon library or an actual library that lends you ebooks? I'm assuming the latter, in which case you just plug in and transfer.
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blakeburch 485 days ago
Actual library that lends me ebooks (Austin). The library uses Overdrive (Libby) and anything provided in the Kindle format can't be downloaded directly from the Library's interface. You have to click a "Read now with Kindle" button which redirects you to Amazon, where you have to click "Get Library Book" directly from Amazon.com.

Epub can be downloaded directly from the library, but these have to be converted into a Kindle compatible format. I'm also unsure if every digital book copy has Epub as a format, since there are some digital copies that don't have Kindle format.

This has been true of all public digital libraries I've used in the past 10 years (Houston, Arlington, Fort Worth)

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