A little under 9 years ago Amazon launched a version of the Kindle app that lived in your web browser. It is called Kindle Cloud Reader, and can be found at Read.Amazon.com.
This often overlooked app has always been a great back up option for reading Kindle ebooks. You could use it to peruse the notes you’ve made in Kindle ebooks, and it even had an offline mode which would store ebooks locally so you could read them when you were offline.
Or at least it used to have an offline option; there’s a report over at MobileRead that this feature has disappeared:
Kindle cloud reader offline doesn’t work anymore. The “Cloud” and “Downloaded” tabs have disappeared.
I just checked, and I can’t find it either. The offline mode is gone.
Any guesses what happened? (I would check with Amazon CS but this is one area where their scripts will give them helpful nothing to say – I’ve seen it before.)
Nate
My parinoid guess,
Amazon doesn’t want people to download their kindle books and store them totally offlnei (i.e. external hard drive DVD, etc) in order to control the content and ensure people are permenantly teathered to the ecosystem. And subject to seeing their purchased books either deleted or modified wherever the latest wok trend blows
xavier
That seems a reasonable level of paranoia.
My first thought was, “but you can still…” Then I realized I hadn’t done … for some time. A quick check of online tutorials for … all show comments around February 2020 saying … no longer works. So it does look like Amazon is locking their system down. Until someone picks the new lock.
It’s way past time for us to wake up to the massive danger of total monopoly of books and other products distribution and sale, leading to total control of production that Amazon poses to the world.
Whenever Amazon deprecates a feature it is for one of two reasons:
1- Limited useage (like active content.
2- A publisher screamed bloody murder.
Pick your poison.
If the ability to download your books have been taken away from the Nook for PC and Kindle – why hasn’t Calibre been designed to pull the books directly from the reader devices? If you can add a book to your device using Calibre, why can’t you do it in reverse? Or can you and I just haven’t found that information? My sister recently did a clean up on our shared desktop computer and wiped out the reading folders thinking they weren’t needed. I was investigating getting into using Calibre and thought I could just load directly from the Kindle but couldn’t. I have an ipad and I really wish we didn’t have to also be dependent on a computer. The device and how open and great it is would bring in the money. This closing things up so tight and preventing people from reading any book no matter where it is purchased On a device they really like is just stupid.
Calibre was designed to be able to read book files from Kindle devices and that feature works for older Kindles. Amazon has been aggressive in updating their DRM to prevent that from being possible with newer devices.
Just as an aside, if you use an older desktop app for windows and open your books in it the awz files are saved locally. Once they are you can drag them into calibre and they will be copied and stored there. Then, if you want, most of the awz books can be converted to pdf for reading by most anything. Note those books downloaded in mobi format often have issues converting but I tend to return them rather than dealing with it.