Amazon feature removed: what does this mean to readers and authors?

You might've already heard the news that on February 26th, Amazon will remove readers' ability to download their ebooks on their hard drive. And a lot of people are panicking, mixing this with KU and all in all... misunderstanding the entire thing.

I'm here to clear this up for you, read on if you're curious.

1) Lots of people have never used or have known this feature, so it probably doesn't change much for many readers.

2) Reading books in Kindle Unlimited has nothing to do with this. Why? Because with KU, you don't buy the ebook anyway, just borrow it, then return when done. You never had the ability to download a book borrowed in KU to your hard drive, as far as I know.

So who is affected? What will you be unable to do come next Wednesday?

Let us imagine for a moment, you aren't using a Kindle to read your e-books, but rather, another e-book reader. Maybe you use a Kobo modell, or something from Nook, or some random company's e-reader. But you still purchase ebooks on Amazon and you'd like to read them, yeah? So what do you do? Once you buy the e-book, you go on the backend and download your ebook to your hard drive, then, using an USB cable, you transfer the file to your e-reader (you might need to convert it). Because you do not own a Kindle, the ebook can't appear on your e-reader magically as soon as you buy it on Amazon, so you have to work around somehow.

Or, maybe you bought an e-book years ago, but the author unpublished it, or Amazon removed it for whatever reason. It might very well disappear from your library. But I paid for it! Well, yes and no. You paid for the licence, not for ownership. I don't like it either, but this is the case with most digital products, and an ebook is indeed a digital book.

What can we do? We have about a week to download our books from Amazon, if you'd like to keep a copy for yourself, just in case. Unfortunately, you can only do this one by one. I'm... sloooowly working through this, as I have way too many ebooks. As is the case for most of us, I imagine.

If you'd like to download your ebooks before the ability disappears, then log in to your Amazon account, open the drop-down menu under "Account & Lists", then choose "Content Library". On the next screen, click books, and there you are. Click on "More actions" and choose "Download & transfer via USB" from the drop-down menu:

That's it. I'll be back to my irregular posting schedule. I do plan to continue with my articles, it's just been hectic and when I saw how much confusion is there reagarding thsi topic, I knew I had to write something ASAP. Do you still have questions? Let me know in the comments!