3 Popular Kindle Vulnerabilities That Amazon Killed

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Businesses give and businesses take away. This is a recurring theme that has been happening for years and continues to happen with high-profile products, especially in the tech world. Sony has announced that it is abandoning physical PlayStation games for the next generation and moving towards an all-digital future after 2028. Google, Apple and Amazon are well known for removing features from products, whether to cut costs or force people to upgrade. Amazon has been in this race for decades, removing popular features from the start. According to the New York Times, Amazon remotely deleted user accounts in 2009 of books they had already paid for and downloaded.

Most recently, Business Insider reported that Amazon was the subject of a class-action lawsuit alleging collusion with publishers to illegally jack up e-book prices. This is especially concerning for anyone who owns a Kindle. Over the years, Amazon has removed many features and closed a few loopholes, workarounds, and hacks that help people improve their Kindle experience.

The best example is Amazon dropping official store support for older Kindles; Models manufactured before 2012 can no longer connect to the Amazon storefront to purchase or download books. Sure, some affected devices are over 15 years old, but that doesn’t change the fact that if you buy a product, you should own it. However, with Amazon eBooks, you only own the license – which is really true for most digital products. Ultimately, Amazon is not opposed to closing loopholes that benefit users to improve their Kindle experience.

In February 2025, Amazon removed the “Download and Transfer via USB” option from its site, which allowed users to manage their books offline and locally, in order to streamline the reading experience, but that probably really means that it wants the books you buy through them to remain locked into its ecosystem. Being locked in is one of the many downsides of owning a Kindle.

This change also broke a third-party plugin in Caliber that allowed owners to convert their books to EPUB or plain text format. Naturally, a workaround was discovered: if you were using an older version of the Kindle software for PC – version 2.4.0 – you could still decrypt the books you owned using an older, outdated encryption format. The workaround was effectively fixed on April 22, 2025. Books published after this date cannot be downloaded by older Kindle for PC clients. Amazon’s servers have been updated to require newer app versions, so anything purchased after the deadline requires the latest software versions.

As you read various books, you may discover text or quotes that you want to save for later. Ebook apps typically make this task easier by providing a wealth of tools, many of which were available natively on Kindle. Users can highlight text, copy and paste it as plain text to access it later. For Kindle books, publisher-related copy limits still applied, so you couldn’t just copy/paste an entire book; you can usually copy a maximum of 5% to 10% of the total text.

However, people used the My Notebook feature in the Kindle app or browser to work around this issue. They would first bulk copy text from a book to My Notebook, then copy and save it to another document, because almost anything you highlighted would be accessible, and it worked even after reaching the copy limit in the reader. As of September 2025, Amazon removed this option entirely. You can still use My Notebook to highlight text and view it in the tool, but you can no longer select and copy it.

This is a problem because the native limit includes everything you’ve ever highlighted or copied from a single title, and once it’s in place, there’s no way to reset it without getting support from Amazon. Deleting or highlighting previous passages does not free up more space. A few other workarounds have popped up, like using the Glasp browser extension or taking screenshots, but the latter is tedious and time-consuming for a lot of text. For now, any quotes or highlights you make remain within the Amazon ecosystem.

When Amazon released version 5.18.5 of the software in September 2025, it introduced stricter encryption measures for e-book files, primarily affecting 11th and 12th generation devices like Paperwhite, Colorsoft, and Scribe. This made decrypting eBooks more difficult and shut down a host of tools used for this process. New eBooks downloaded to newer Kindles are in KFX-ZIP format versus KFX. This is important because they cannot be decrypted with public DRM removal tools, and all books purchased after April 2025 are in this format and remain locked.

A limited workaround allowed owners of older Kindles, including jailbroken models, to access copies of books from before that date. However, according to some reports, various Kindles running version 5.16.2.1.1 are seeing the new DRM protections further limit library freedoms. Additionally, many who have already jailbroken their devices cannot access the content either. It’s no wonder people are abandoning Kindles in droves in favor of non-Amazon e-readers.

While this isn’t entirely a workaround and Amazon isn’t restricting it yet, you can buy your ebooks on other storefronts or acquire them from other sources, even if you own a Kindle. This really is your best option if you really want to own the books you buy. Places to find DRM-free books include Project Gutenberg, ebooksdotcom, Standard Ebooks, Bookshopdotorg, and many others.

If you’re wondering how to transfer these books to your device, one of the most useful Kindle features that you probably don’t use often enough is designed specifically for this, called Send to Kindle. If you don’t already have a Kindle, or even if you want to upgrade an aging model, you can look for alternatives that allow some of the features that Amazon doesn’t offer. Kobo is a good start, with the Kobo Clara Color (I currently own one) and the Kobo Libra Color standing out. The Boox models are also very good, like the Boox Go Series or the Boox Palma 2.