Three Days Remain to Backup your Kindle Books.

Starting February 26, 2025, Amazon will remove the option to download purchased Kindle books to a computer for manual transfer via USB. This change effectively ends the easiest way to back up your purchases or convert them for non-Kindle devices — reinforcing that you don’t truly own digital media you buy. It also means losing peace of mind: if Amazon ever decides to remove or alter a title, there’s no guaranteed method to keep your original copy.

Over the years, Amazon has occasionally pulled ebooks from its store, sometimes even deleting them from users’ devices. In 2009, it removed George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm after discovering they were published without proper rights; recently, many Roald Dahl books were edited and re-uploaded. Such incidents highlight how vulnerable digital purchases are when cloud-based providers control both access and distribution.

Once the download feature is discontinued, books you’ve already transferred via USB will remain on your Kindle, but any new purchases will have to be delivered through Wi-Fi or Amazon’s Kindle apps. Although USB transfer still works for manually loading other ebook files using third-party solutions like Calibre, the direct download of your paid Kindle ebooks to a computer will no longer be possible.

Maybe we should go back to buying physical books. You can always lend them to someone or even donate them the the U3A Box Hill Library — something that is not easily possible with eBooks.

This is a summary of an article from The Verge:
https://www.theverge.com/news/612898/amazon-removing-kindle-book-download-transfer-usb

Edit: Additional Information

Here is how you can download your Kindle books, one at a time:

For the more tech-savvy, you can bulk download your Kindle books. Here is how to do it: