If Amazon falls down

What would happen to all of our Kindle E-books and Apps that We have gotten from Amazon, if they suddenly were to collapse. Would we lose all our purchases?

Aye, probably. Then again, probably not. Hope this helps.

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God I hope not! Still, seems unlikely Amazon would go under to that extent, and that another similar company wouldn't honour their sales.

I'm just a tiny bit concerned that's all, what with all the trouble folk are having in the States and over here. Just want to know if someone's already come up with an answer

I can't see it happening Toyah, but if it concerns you back up all your books onto your pc.
To do this go to Manage Your Kindle page on Amazons site and under the action button on the right hand side of each book select the download and transfer via usb option. The book will download onto your pc and you need to use your cable to put them onto your kindle. Also, each book has to be done individually so if you have a large library it might take a while.
Another way is if you have all your books on your kindle is to plug it into your pc and take a copy of your book folder. I think this should work, but somebody else needs to confirm it :-))

I was worried about losing all my content if the world ended last week, but fortunately it didn't happen.

Quite a lot of things I worry about don't happen!

Some of the bad things that have happened to me I hadn't even thought of!

Yeah, like your Fire not warming up your conservatory :-))

Thanks Suze
I will get my son to do that today, but I'm more concerned with my Apps that Iv got from Amazon

Toyah, I really don't think there will be a problem. If anything does happen we will start to hear rumours in advance and that would be the time to worry and do something about it. This is the problem with digital media, we have no hard copies as back up, but we can't have it both ways.

True Xx

I wouldn't worry too much. It's not like the DRM is impossible to crack, just illegal. If Amazon were to fail, i,'m sure there would be much discussion about how to do it

Pls keep us informed, I donot want to lose my Free Apps if the unfortunate we're going to happen. I'm going to back up my Kindle books just like Suze shown me how....but I just wondered if it was possible to back all your data this way?

¿

Cheeky!

💩🐩👈

I was just about to say maybe I'm panicking about nothing..but after all the hassle you lot were getting with your Fires and the App Store, both here in the UK and over in the US, it was starting too concern me slight. That's why I wanted to find if anyone had any good ideas.

Now!now! We can't have that here, you Mr Cheek

@Suze
The transfer of all your books from the Manage Your Kindle pages to your PC using the USB option would seem sensible but it's going to take me forever with over 1,000 books. Shame you have to do each one individually. I wish Amazon would program a bulk download facility from MYK.

As for the other suggestion of making a backup of your books on the Kindle to your PC. Firstly this would need to be done for each Kindle you own because the books are effectively DRM'd to each individual device. I was able to do this with my Kindle KK's no problem.

However, when I got my Kindle Touch, I tried the same copy / paste routine to back up the books on it ... it started off fine copying books across and then Windows reported there were file names that were too long for it to handle and aborted. I tried several times on both Windows XP and Windows 7 machines with the same result ... 'some file names are too long for Windows to handle'. Bizarre! Why the Touch has to attribute such lengthy file names heavens only knows.

I haven't tried it with my newish Paperwhite, but I have a strong suspicion I'd find the same problem. :o(

Perhaps Amazon could be given some sort of tax exemption, to prevent any possible financial stress

If you have the kindle app on your pc all you need to do is open that, go to archive & double click on each title & they then appear on your pc in seconds. Just tried this after reading this thread, I would be devasted to lose my books & I've transfered approx 100 bks in less than 5 minutes only another 400 to go!!

Eric, I like your style! ;-D

"If you have the kindle app on your pc all you need to do is open that, go to archive & double click on each title & they then appear on your pc in seconds."

Just as long as you know that books downloaded to your pc this way cannot be read on your Kindle.

I think the solution to the worry about losing your digital content is to get a program to crack the Amazon DRM and so turn all your books into MOBI format which is readable on the Kindle. In fact it is the basic Kindle format. Amazon just DRM the MOBI format. There are commercial programs (about £30) that are very easy to install and run but you can also find free DRM cracking software too. It's just a little fiddlier to install if you are not a geek. Once you have all your books in MOBI format you just copy them to your DOCS folder (they dont appear in BOOKS for some reason. Only DRM content will apear under BOOKS). You can also use a program like Calibre to convert your books to other formats like EPUB so they can be read on other readers like the Sony reader.

The problem with DRM'ed content is that you dont really own it. Its more as if its being rented to you. You have the insecurity, expressed in this thread, of losing your books if Amazon go under, you cannot easily loan books to other people and you cannot sell your books or give then away. Amazon severely restrict your use of your books in a way that is not applicable to hard-copy books.

As far as I am aware it is NOT ILLEGAL to crack the DRM on a book. You have bought the book so you should be able to do what you like with it in the same way you can do anything with the physical copy of a book you have bought. What would be illegal is to make copies to distribute on the net as this would be a breach of copyright. Breaking the DRM is not a copyright infringement as such.

You should be able to lend, give and sell on your copy of an ebook, but you must delete it from your own machine once you have passed it on. This is probably unrealistic for most of us. The ethical practice I would suggest is to un-DRM all your books and archive them on your PC and other backup media and then only share them with three or four other people. Thus the readership of an e-book will be similar to that of a real book, in the sense that most hard-copy books will get passed around and be read by several people. It seems unreasonable to me that Amazon should expect only one person to read each book that is purchased from them. On the other hand it is not unreasonable that they should try to protect themselves from piracy. The problem is that in doing this they severely restrict use by the consumer. This is a problem that the industry are going to have to deal with at some point. At the moment the advantage is skewed heavily to Amazon.

So get cracking. Do a Google on 'software for removing drm from ebooks'.

In reply to Wilber G above...

If you download your Kindle book to your PC it is possible to read it on both your PC (altho its not comfortable to do so) and on your Kindle. It is possible to register a number of devices on your Kindle account that allow downloading and there are also convoluted ways of sharing your content with family members, but I believe in that case loaning a book to someone else does prevent you reading it on your own Kindle. You need to install Kindle for the PC and register the copy on your account if you want to remove the DRM as the book needs to be on your PC for the un-DRM software to operate.