Amazon has a long and storied history of discontinuing services that people use. Last October, the company announced that in February 2025, they were shuttering Kindle Vella, their serialized stories platform. Last year the company killed off Kindle Flash Cards Now, Amazon has announced they are killing off USB File Transfers for all Kindle Books. Amazon is pulling a Google, killing off popular services, and now Amazon is not trusted by its longtime users.
The “Download & Transfer via USB” option will no longer be available starting February 26, 2025. However, you can still send Kindle books to your Wi-Fi-enabled devices by selecting the “Deliver or Remove from Device” option. Send to Kindle, Sideloading e-books and 3rd party programs such as Calibre will continue to operate.
Aside from killing off services, Amazon has been known to remove books from Kindle e-readers without warning. I remember when they removed Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell because the company that added them to the Kindle store had no rights. Amazon removed Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and The Virtue of Selfishness because they were illegal. Amazon says they can remove books from a device at any time, for any reason.
The Amazon Kindle might be the most popular e-reader in the world, with a controlling market share in Canada, the USA, and the United Kingdom. However, they are so ubiquitous with e-readers because of the hardcore readers who got them there. These users conglomerate together on Reddit, Facebook Groups, and other forums. They share their homemade cases and new e-readers and discuss everything about Kindle. However, everyone is in arms with the recent USB File Transfer Change.
Amazon is the only e-reader brand that regularly kills off their services and removes books and users are already switching to competing brands, where this sort of thing never happens. Rakuten Kobo is the second largest e-reader company in the world and has not had any controversies of note. Their software is stable and has black and white e-readers and colour e-paper. Most of their devices still have manual page-turn buttons, something Amazon abandoned years ago. Pocketbook is another brand people are switching to, since their e-readers support the most sideloaded book formats and are a rock stable company.
Users are encouraged to use Download and Transfer via USB right now, and back up your books, while you still can. February 26th is right around the corner.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.