Amazon has taken a lot of flack recently for its crackdowns on legitimate users. In the last year, we’ve seen Amazon make changes to its DRM, making it even harder to remove, while also removing the ability for people to download and back-up their Kindle e-books.
Thankfully for Kindle fans, Amazon is rolling back some of those changes, and will be bringing back the ability to download e-books as EPUB files in early 2026. However, not all e-books will be available, as it’ll now be down to publishers to decide whether to make downloads available or not (via Good Ereader).
EPUB downloads will be back in January 2026
Amazon took away the option to download and transfer e-books through its website in February 2025, closing a loophole that had, admittedly, been used to crack e-book DRM from files in order to send them to other e-readers or users. However, users who were using that service to download and legitimately back up their books were also caught in the crossfire.
Thankfully, those rules are being relaxed, and rather than making dictations from on-high, Amazon is instead leaving it down to individual publishers to rule when an e-book has DRM attached. A statement from the Kindle Direct Publishing help page states thusly:
“You have full control over your DRM settings and can change them at any time. Your DRM setting affects future download availability for all customers, regardless of when they purchased your book. After you select not to apply DRM, any verified purchaser will be able to download EPUB and PDF files effective January 20, 2026. If you later apply DRM, no new downloads in EPUB or PDF format will be available. However, readers who already downloaded EPUB or PDF files will retain access to them.”
Authors and publishers will need to confirm whether they want DRM on their e-books or not before publishing them on Kindle, and decisions made from December 10 will go into effect from January 20, 2026 onwards.
However, any e-books published prior to December 9 will require the author or publisher to confirm the DRM status, or those previous works will continue to not be available for download.
At a second glance, it appears as if Amazon is simply pushing the responsibility for DRM onto authors and publishers, and avoiding getting any backlash itself.
However, it goes deeper than that. Some publishers, like those who publish academic textbooks, will be highly likely to support as much DRM as possible. Whereas your more common fiction author may prefer that their book gets into as many hands as possible, and would support the removal of DRM. And that’s without mentioning any ethical concerns about owning an e-book, rather than simply having a “license” that can be taken away.
Regardless, this is a very good move from Amazon, and will help to restore some of the goodwill it’s lost in 2025. While it’s unlikely to bring back anyone who swapped to Kobo or any other of Kindle’s competitors, it’s still a good, pro-consumer move.
