Aug 10, 2026
Weber's killing your June oven's app and still selling subscriptions for it.
Weber's killing your June oven's app and still selling subscriptions for it.
Amazon took away your ability to own books on your Kindle.
Amazon sells Kindle books with a "Buy" button, but in 2025 it removed the only official way to download them, leaving customers' libraries entirely inside a cloud the company has deleted purchased books from before.
Published Aug 18, 2026
What happened
Amazon lets you "buy" Kindle books, but in the US it now spells out in the fine print that you're only purchasing a license, not the book itself.
On February 26, 2025, Amazon removed the "Download & Transfer via USB" button, the one feature that let you save your purchased books to your own computer.
That button was the only sanctioned way to keep a real backup, move a book to a non-Kindle device, or strip the DRM so it stayed readable if Amazon ever pulled it.
Without it, your library lives only inside Amazon's cloud, and the company has reached in and deleted purchased books before, famously wiping copies of "1984" off people's Kindles in 2009.
After the announcement, many consumers downloaded their purchased e-books while the feature was available. Many people have also moved to other providers to buy e-books going forward.
In April 2026 Amazon went further and began cutting off support for Kindles made before 2013, so even the hardware you paid for slowly stops working.
Amazon should either let you truly own what you buy or stop putting a "Buy" button on it. Anything else is charging full price for a rental and hoping nobody calls them out for it.
FULU's takeaway
Amazon admits in its own fine print that Kindle customers only get a license, removed the last official way to back up purchased books, and has already shown it will delete books people paid for, yet it still puts a "Buy" button on every title.
Why this is a law problem
Most of these entries involve a digital lock guarding copyrighted software, and a lock like that sits under Section 1201 of the DMCA, 17 U.S.C. 1201. Subsection 1201(a)(1) makes it unlawful to bypass a lock that controls access to a copyrighted work, even when no copyright is infringed. Subsections 1201(a)(2) and 1201(b)(1) separately ban making or distributing the tools that do the bypassing.
Every three years the Librarian of Congress can exempt narrow classes of uses from the first ban. An exemption expires after three years and has to be re-argued, and the rulemaking has no authority over the tool bans, so a granted exemption still leaves no lawful supplier for the means to use it. FULU exists to reform or revoke this statute.
If you want this law changed, donations fund the work. FULU is a 501(c)(4). Donations to FULU are not tax-deductible, which is the tradeoff for being able to lobby without a limit.
Nothing on these pages says any company named here violated Section 1201. FULU is not a law firm, and this is not legal advice.
The original post
The slides below are the originals as posted. Where a slide and the text on this page disagree, go by the text; the text is the corrected, sourced record. Some slides also print an old wiki address that no longer works. The links on this page are current.
Originally published as an Instagram carousel on Aug 18, 2026: See Instagram post.
Sources
This entry condenses Amazon Kindle removes download feature of purchased books on consumerrights.wiki.
More entries
Aug 03, 2026
Adobe shut down its servers and quietly shifted away from software ownership.
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