I bought a book on my Kindle — a thing I have done many times before. I exchanged money for goods, as one is supposed to do in a capitalist society. Then this happened.
“While you can continue reading books previously downloaded, you can no longer download Kindle books to this device. You can, of course, continue to read purchased books using Kindle for Web, iOS, Mac and PCs well as supported Kindle devices.”
I wonder what response Jeff Bezos expects me to do. Does he think I will buy a new Kindle? I can’t think of any other explanation for crippling a perfectly functional device.
But of course I won’t buy a new Kindle, when this one is perfectly functional. I’ll just pirate the book that I have already paid for. I will find somewhere that I can download a non-DRM-crippled copy of the book, and put it on my device that I have also already paid for.
And as for buying more books from Amazon? What will happen now? From a quick survey of my ordering history, it seems I bought 25 Kindle ebooks in the first half of 2026, so the buying rate is about 50 a year, or one a week. Will I keep doing this?
Well, from now on the workflow will be:
- Find the book I want on Amazon.
- Buy it.
- Find the same book on a torrent site.
- Download it.
- Physically copy it onto the Kindle via a USB cable.
And it can hardly escape anyone’s notice that I would achieve exactly the same end-state — the book on my Kindle — if I just skipped the first two stages. In other words, under the new regimen, the first two steps consist of me investing my precious time into giving Jeff Bezos my in exchange for absolutely no benefit whatsoever.
So it looks as though this move — both mean-spirited and commercially incompetent — will result in the loss of about 50 book sales per year. And I cannot be the only person who has had this reaction to the semi-bricking of my perfectly functional device