Amazon & Epub – A Bit Sad Discovery
Amazon announced that on January 20th, 2026, they were going to make any book that wasn’t DRM protected to be available for download as an epub or a pdf. For anyone who has followed me on my social media, they know that I’m an absolutely fan of the epub format. It is one of the few ways that you can own digital products where a company doesn’t have their greedy, restrictive hands on it. I think it is a big deal that Amazon has seen enough of a threat from other epub distributors that they are loosening their hold.
I went to my Kindle library to see what was available and discovered that out of 116 books that I own, only 5 were able to be downloaded. And three of them were dictionaries. To be clear, I do not in any way fault authors in wanting to use DRM to protect their works. I can understand the need to want to protect something they created and I know I might be approaching this while being selfish. It’s just that I was hoping there would be a lot more of my library available to save in my calibre library in case Amazon’s AI randomly decides I’m somehow a bad person and bans me which would mean I lose access to my entire library. (Yes, you do not own your books per Amazon. You license and thus subject to losing access if you are banned for whatever reason.) This is why I actually try to buy from websites that provide an epub (thank you Smashwords).
What is the point of all this?
Nothing really. I just wanted to write out my feelings about the whole ownership of your digital content, the games that are played and an author’s valid concern over protecting one’s work. This is also my blog to share thoughts like this to inflict on everyone else (joking of course).
In my case, if you are someone who does enjoy reading my works, if you do buy from Amazon, you’ll find that all my works are not DRM restricted where possible and are available for download as epubs. I know I can’t stop pirates from stealing my works even with DRM (there are ways to strip DRM from amazon books).
Anyhow. That’s my thoughts on the subject.