Vladimir Campos

EN | PT

At the beginning of this year, Amazon announced that downloading purchased Kindle books from their website would no longer be possible after February 26.

Needless to say, that sparked a lot of anger online. In my case, it triggered a new stage of the Digital Cavemen project. I downloaded all my books, removed the DRM, and switched to the duo of Calibre and BookFusion. I also decided I would only buy new eBooks on Amazon if they were unavailable anywhere else.

That was that, or so I thought. Last week I received an email entitled New eBook Download Options for Readers Coming in 2026. While it might look like they are reverting the February decision, that’s not the case. This is something different.

Starting January 20, 2026, Amazon will make it easier for readers to enjoy content they have purchased from the Kindle store across a wider range of devices and applications by allowing new titles published without Digital Rights Management (DRM) to be downloaded in EPUB and PDF format.

As a KDP author, I could always choose to publish my books without DRM. However, that never meant you could read the book anywhere you liked. Not using DRM simply meant the file could be opened on another Kindle device not registered to you, but the file still wouldn’t work on a Kobo, for example.

So, what this email reveals is that books labeled as DRM-free will finally behave like real DRM-free files. You’ll actually be able to download and read them anywhere. But, there’s a catch.

If you take no action, the DRM-status of your previously published titles will not change but the EPUB and PDF downloads will not be enabled for existing DRM-free titles. If you want to allow reader downloads for these titles, follow the directions below on or after December 9, and select the option not to apply DRM.

As you can see, authors have to manually open each book and confirm they accept the change. I have already started doing this for my books, but I wouldn’t expect it to happen for the majority of the existing catalog. An author has to dig into the settings, select a new DRM box, and wait several minutes for the process to finish for every single title.

Does this change my Digital Caveman strategy? Not really. It is good to see Amazon opening up, even if it is just a bit and basically for show, but there’s no going back for me. The moment I started managing my files in my own system rather than relying on a platform’s permission to download and use them, something clicked, and I started seeing another much more reasonable path.