Amazon has removed Download & Transfer option

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

At least in the UK, one is entitled to a refund if one hasn't downloaded the book. So I don't download until the price match has been fulfilled.

Good to know.

I have got refunds on Amazon ebooks bought by mistake due to stupid layout of wish list when deleting multiple ebooks. One ought to be able to use a "basket" for ebooks and not "1-Click".

[lkmiller]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

At least in the UK, one is entitled to a refund if one hasn't downloaded the book. So I don't download until the price match has been fulfilled.

And by then you've missed Amazon's sale. I'll just buy it there as long as I am still able to decrypt them. I'll risk a Kobo price match if I see it cheaper at Google or something.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by lkmiller

And by then you've missed Amazon's sale. I'll just buy it there as long as I am still able to decrypt them. I'll risk a Kobo price match if I see it cheaper at Google or something.

My plan was to buy at Amazon if the price match didn't come through in time. But it did.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by lkmiller

And by then you've missed Amazon's sale. I'll just buy it there as long as I am still able to decrypt them. I'll risk a Kobo price match if I see it cheaper at Google or something.

Lately, my price matches have turned around in less than a day, leaving time to buy a book at Amazon if necessary. But of course that's not certain. On the other hand, you've got a week to return a Kindle book, so you could just buy both and wait on developments.

It's all looking like too much trouble to me. I think if the Kindle price shows the dreaded digital discount, I'll go back to buying at Amazon and be done. I really don't care if I can't download/sideload/decrypt; I'll just read it on a Kindle. That's why I have them.

[John F]

... I think if the Kindle price shows the dreaded digital discount...

Can an example link be posted so I know what to look out for?

[Timboli]

Have Amazon now progressed to the next stage?

A couple of hours ago, I discovered to my horror, that my old Paperwhite device (memory says it's second generation, but I need to check), is now almost full of ebooks converted to KFX, and my latest downloads via Wifi were KFX.

I discuss that here.

[j.p.s]

^ That was not because of any "next stage" by amazon. Depending on your PW2 firmware upgrade history, it would have downloaded KFX over wifi years ago. Avoiding KFX over wifi was the basis for all the fuss about USB D&T going on for years.

[jonathan2022]

Wonder if this will extend to kindle for pc for documents. Not bought books. Send to kindle. On older devices

[Ma'am-I-Am]

@Timboli
I use a PW2 also. How did you find out about the "conversion"? Were these books already on the PW2?

I'm also unclear on exactly why KFX is considered such a horror.

[Scoob]

I always understood KFX DRM as the tougher of Amazon's DRM schemes and AZW or AZW3 was the weakest thus the easier to remove from your purchases.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Ma'am-I-Am

@Timboli
I use a PW2 also. How did you find out about the "conversion"? Were these books already on the PW2?

Probably looking at the /documents/Downloads/Items01 directory and realizing that it is filled with KFX format ebooks and matching .sdr directories containing a voucher file a couple of levels down. Though I'm not sure if there was any conversion and simply that they did not realize their device was downloading KFX format files for years.

Originally Posted by Ma'am-I-Am

I'm also unclear on exactly why KFX is considered such a horror.

Unlike azw3/KF8 where you can extract the contents and they will be pretty close to the original ePub used to generate the file or an ePub generated from the docx input file, KFX is a semi-compiled format and a total pain to decompile (look at the KFX Input plugin thread in the calibre plugins forum. The output file will have little resemblance to the file used to generate the KFX file.

For my purposes, I have a mass of saved searches used in Sigil to clean up ePubs extracted from azw3/KFX files using KindleUnpack. By comparison, an ePub generated by the From KFX tool looks like the CSS has been run though a tool that uses junk stylenames making saved searches much less useful. I tend to avoid calibre's conversion pipeline since it is tends to munge multiple stylesheets together.

[Timboli]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

^ That was not because of any "next stage" by amazon. Depending on your PW2 firmware upgrade history, it would have downloaded KFX over wifi years ago. Avoiding KFX over wifi was the basis for all the fuss about USB D&T going on for years.

Last time I looked, and I couldn't tell you when that was, there were no KFX files on my Paperwhite.

Except when side loading to my ereaders, I rarely look at them and the content of the Documents folder.

So maybe it has been going on longer than I realized. But I was also going by comments from others in this thread and many others, where they seemed to indicate that a Paperwhite 2 was still a safe bet.

I used to grab KFX files from KindleForPC, and process them through calibre, until Amazon put a stop to that, demanding a newer PC and newer version of KindleForPC. At that time, I switched to doing the Download & Transfer via USB method. I actually wasn't aware I could get files off my device and process through calibre, only becoming aware of that when Download & Transfer via USB was canceled.

Thus far, I have only used my Kindle Keyboard twice to do that ... not buying much from Amazon anymore, them having pissed me off too many times.

I was fully expecting to find I could do the same with my Paperwhite, but have only just gotten around to trying that, and it failed ... though I was provided with a solution.

[Timboli]

Originally Posted by Ma'am-I-Am

@Timboli
I use a PW2 also. How did you find out about the "conversion"? Were these books already on the PW2?

I'm also unclear on exactly why KFX is considered such a horror.

I opened up the Documents folder on my Paperwhite, and saw all the KFX files. My last recollection of that folder, is there weren't any KFX files there. I could also see that some were in the process of being converted to KFX, which also makes me think this is fairly recent.

So yes those ebooks have been on my device a long time, most of them, and they never used to be KFX.

My Paperwhite has also been pretty full for a long time, and usually I need to remove something to add a new purchase, but I always seem to be chasing my tail. I free up space, and then before I know it that space has disappeared, which could be an indicator of space being used up with the larger KFX format. So perhaps lack of space, limited conversion to KFX.

So one of the issues on an old Paperwhite that has limited storage space, is having large ebook files (KFX), when I'd much rather they were the smaller AZW or AZW3.

So that's one of the horrors, and also why I, like others probably, did not expect KFX to turn up on that device.

The other horror, is KFX is harder to remove DRM from. I can no longer do so on this particular PC, as I need a more recent version of calibre and the NoDRM plugin and KFXIn plugin, neither of which are supported on this PC. I can get around that on my newer laptop, but I'm not setup for that yet.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Timboli

So maybe it has been going on longer than I realized. But I was also going by comments from others in this thread and many others, where they seemed to indicate that a Paperwhite 2 was still a safe bet.

Only if the firmware version is low enough.

What firmware version is your PW2 running?

[jonathan2022]

Originally Posted by Timboli

I opened up the Documents folder on my Paperwhite, and saw all the KFX files. My last recollection of that folder, is there weren't any KFX files there. I could also see that some were in the process of being converted to KFX, which also makes me think this is fairly recent.

So yes those ebooks have been on my device a long time, most of them, and they never used to be KFX.

My Paperwhite has also been pretty full for a long time, and usually I need to remove something to add a new purchase, but I always seem to be chasing my tail. I free up space, and then before I know it that space has disappeared, which could be an indicator of space being used up with the larger KFX format. So perhaps lack of space, limited conversion to KFX.

So one of the issues on an old Paperwhite that has limited storage space, is having large ebook files (KFX), when I'd much rather they were the smaller AZW or AZW3.

So that's one of the horrors, and also why I, like others probably, did not expect KFX to turn up on that device.

The other horror, is KFX is harder to remove DRM from. I can no longer do so on this particular PC, as I need a more recent version of calibre and the NoDRM plugin and KFXIn plugin, neither of which are supported on this PC. I can get around that on my newer laptop, but I'm not setup for that yet.

Have you ever tried Linux. Xubuntu works on older computers. Version 24.04 (year and month) is supported for 3 years and supports the latest calibre. I haven't tried kindle 2.40 yet on it . You use a program called wine to install windows programs.