Amazon removed books from my Kindle

[Sirtel]

I was a late adopter of ebooks. By then, the Kindle ecosystem was already well established. But before I bought my first Kindle book (I had bought some DRM-free PDF and EPUB books directly from small publishers before that - BTW, none of those publishers are still in business, but I still have the books), I did a thorough research into DRM and its removal - the most important question that I had was "how can I make my own personal back-up copies of the books I buy?" I hadn't heard about stores going out of business and abandoning their customers back then, but backing up my digital purchases was just a natural thing to think of, for me. It didn't even enter into my mind to rely on Amazon or any other store to keep my books.

I haven't changed my viewpoint since then. All digital stuff I want to keep, free or bought, has been backed up in multiple places. I might never need some of it, maybe even most of it, but that doesn't matter - what matters is that it'll be available if I do need it.

I'm not that anal in every aspect of my life, of course - very few people are. But my digital stuff is important to me, so I take care of it. Everyone has different priorities and people value different things. I know plenty of people who don't care about their digital stuff all that much.

[Jean]

I have been purchasing ebooks for the past 25 years or so. I began purchasing ebooks from Amazon in 2007 with the Kindle 1. Four - Five years ago Amazon deleted my entire content library from their site.

I argued for a while with customer service about it but after getting no real assistance I gave up. Because I had backed up all my purchases in Calibre it wasn't worth the effort arguing with them. Had I not backed them up I would have lost hundreds of ebooks.

I still have access to the earliest books I had purchased for my palm reader and ebookwise. I had seen and heard of book sellers closing shop and people losing access to their books. It only takes a few seconds to import them into Calibre and protect my purchases.

[JBaby]

Originally Posted by Jean

I still have access to the earliest books I had purchased for my palm reader and ebookwise. I had seen and heard of book sellers closing shop and people losing access to their books. I only takes a few seconds to import them into Calibre and protect my purchases.

I have all my books from Peanut Press/eReader and Fictionwise. Those were the days!!!!

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by JBaby

I have all my books from Peanut Press/eReader and Fictionwise. Those were the days!!!!

I dealt with Fictionwise, and I still have all of those books I purchased.

I still have three ebook readers from that era: the GEMs (?) and all accessories - cards, cover, original box for one of the three, etc. - in storage. I have no idea if they still work.

Yes, those were the days!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by cgsmom

Yes, this. When I first started buying ebooks from Amazon, you had to choose the format you wanted. I think they sold LIT, PDB, and EPUB. The books I bought in .LIT format from Amazon are not in my Kindle library. When I emailed Amazon about those books, I was ignored. But they were backed up and liberated so no harm no foul.

There was no ePub back then. It was LIT, PDB, and PDF.

[JBaby]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

I dealt with Fictionwise, and I still have all of those books I purchased.

I still have three ebook readers from that era: the GEMs (?) and all accessories - cards, cover, original box for one of the three, etc. - in storage. I have no idea if they still work.

Yes, those were the days!

Fictionwise was how I got into indie authors. They had a program that allowed authors to serialize their stories. I still have all of them. I’m still friends with some of those authors today.

My Mom was cleaning my office not too long ago and she found my old silver Handspring Visor Edge! I read so many books on that thing!!!

[Willow5613]

Originally Posted by Hollow Man

I'm just so not concerned. If what you say happens I'll still have them on my physical Kindle, and someone will have a way for me to get them off and use them elsewhere. Or I'll go find pirated versions of all the books I bought and still want to read, feeling fully justified in the action.

I simply can't spend all this time now worrying about what may happen in the future.

A month ago I opened my paperwhite to start reading and *all* my books were gone. Downloaded from amazon, side-loaded, send-to-kindle, whatever. It had been on airplane mode for a while, maybe a month. The only way to get it to work again was to factory reset, which of course forced a connection to the server and updates. I ordered a kobo.

[kbullet]

Wonder if they have fixed this in any of their latest firmware? on 5.18.1 made a mistake of toggling the airplane mode and now all of the sideloaded books are gone again...

One thing i noticed is even if you leave the wifi on, as long as you don't put it on airplane mode it won't get nuked. So i guess either use airplane mode on permanently, or if you're connected to wifi don't turn on airplane mode.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by kbullet

Wonder if they have fixed this in any of their latest firmware? on 5.18.1 made a mistake of toggling the airplane mode and now all of the sideloaded books are gone again...

One thing i noticed is even if you leave the wifi on, as long as you don't put it on airplane mode it won't get nuked. So i guess either use airplane mode on permanently, or if you're connected to wifi don't turn on airplane mode.

So you have two choices. Keep WiFi off or keep WiFi on and nuke the battery.

I'll go with keep WiFi off and don't buy books from Amazon.

[Frogm4n]

Originally Posted by kbullet

Wonder if they have fixed this in any of their latest firmware? on 5.18.1 made a mistake of toggling the airplane mode and now all of the sideloaded books are gone again...

One thing i noticed is even if you leave the wifi on, as long as you don't put it on airplane mode it won't get nuked. So i guess either use airplane mode on permanently, or if you're connected to wifi don't turn on airplane mode.

It's been pretty well established that as long as you let it go online at least every couple of weeks then it's likely nothing will be deleted. You don't have to leave wifi on constantly.

[Hollow Man]

Originally Posted by Frogm4n

It's been pretty well established that as long as you let it go online at least every couple of weeks then it's likely nothing will be deleted. You don't have to leave wifi on constantly.

And if you flag your sideloaded books as personal docs, they won't be removed when the wifi is on.

I'm not saying that it's acceptable that this is happening, just that it's likely not malicious, and there are workarounds if sideloading is important to you.

[kbullet]

Originally Posted by Frogm4n

It's been pretty well established that as long as you let it go online at least every couple of weeks then it's likely nothing will be deleted. You don't have to leave wifi on constantly.

I left wifi on all of the time, only today i toggled airplane mode by accident for less than half an hour and it nuked my library. So my uneducated guess there might be some weird logic on the kindle to trigger the nuke wrt to the airplane mode toggle.
Where as leaving the wifi on but not connected the internet for a couple of weeks (travelling). Came back it didn't nuke it at all when it finally connected to a working wifi.

[haertig]

Even if my Kindle gets inadvertently taken out of permanent airplane mode, it's not going to get very far because it does not know any credentials to login to any WiFi.

Years ago when I decided my Paperwhite should no longer communicate with Amazon, I went to delete the existing WiFi login credentials from the device. IIRC, in order to do that, you had to first turn on WiFi (take it out of airplane mode). It was something like that anyway. I could not find a way to delete the existing WiFi credentials without allowing it to first access WiFi and potentially login to Amazon "one last time". I could have simply unplugged the WAN cable from my WiFi router, but instead, I changed the WiFi passwords on the router. So my Paperwhite retained the credentials, and does to this day, but they are incorrect credentials now, and won't get it anywhere (I changed both my routers WiFi password, AND it's SSID). I figured this was the best way to permanently detach my Paperwhite from the internet, even though it was a bit more of a hassle to reconfigure SSID/WiFi passwords on my other devices than to unplug the WAN cable on the router. There was this nagging suspicion in the back of my mind that even if I went into the Paperwhite and deleted the existing credentials, would Amazon REALLY delete those credentials? It's sad that we have to consider the possibility of "way out there, nobody would do that" type of stuff like this, but I'm afraid we might have to when dealing with modern high tech companies. Amazon still acts as if this Paperwhite is THEIR device, not MINE.

My Paperwhite still stays in permanent airplane mode to save battery, but even if it accidentally escaped that mode, it's not going to be talking to Amazon. The few minor features that I lose by disabling network connectivity are features that I never used back when I had them, and would still never use if I had them now. So I'm fine using my Paperwhite on it's own little isolated island. I sideload to it using a USB cable and Calibre. When it finally dies, I will research (at that time) to find the best eReader to replace it with. When that time comes, if things still exist the way they do today, the replacement will not be a Kindle. Who knows, Amazon may have changed their ways by then. But that's highly unlikely IMHO.

[tsgreer]

This is why I never upgraded past my Kindle 3 (Kindle Keyboard). I’ve never turned on it's Wi-Fi or even registered the device. Every book I own is sideloaded, and I still have titles from the old Fictionwise days.

I like tech, but there’s a point where upgrading stops being worth the hassle. It feels like things get worse instead of better. For my Kindle 3, I can change out the battery, and even change out the screen, and I have several back-up Kindle 3 e-readers scrounged from ebay. So I should be set up to use this thing forever.

So I’ve firmly planted myself in the 2000 to 2010 ebook tech era and stayed there. I guess I'm sorta like a modern Amish person, cuz I ain't moving on from that decade!