Flash! Deregistering removes local copies?

Flash! Deregistering removes local copies?

I’ve written before about what I call the register/deregister dance. 

What happens in r/dd is that someone will register to an account, download books from those archive, deregister from the account, and still have the books on the device.

Many people have reported doing this, and it seems to have worked in the past. 

I’ve asked Amazon different times in different ways (including snail mailing their legal department) if this was okay.  

It clearly isn’t okay (under the Terms of Service) to sell or give a Kindle to someone not on your account with Kindle content on it, but that’s not what’s happening in this case.  When the person downloads from the archives, they are on that account.  The ownership of the Kindle doesn’t change.

However, someone in the Amazon Kindle community just reported getting this message:

“Are you sure you want to deregister this device? Deregistering will remove all of your licensed content from this device. If you plan to re-register this device in the future you will need to re-download your licensed contents from the archived items.”

That was on a Kindle for Mac installation.

I’ve asked Amazon if this is true just for reader apps, or for Kindles as well.

If it’s true for Kindles, it’s definitely a change, and a significant one.  I also hadn’t heard of that happening on Kindle apps before, but I suppose it might have been.

I checked to see if the Help Page from Amazon was updated…it still seems to indicate that you would have to remove the books manually:

“Also, once the Kindle is deregistered, any books, subscriptions, or other content you’ve purchased from the Kindle Store will no longer be delivered to the device.

Remove all purchased material from the Kindle device. Purchased Kindle content cannot be sold according to the License Agreement and Terms of Use of the Amazon Kindle”
–Amazon Help Page

That first part is saying that you can’t get books from your archives, and we knew that.

This would complicate things for parents who have been putting books on to a minor’s Kindle, and then deregistering it so that child can’t buy more books from the Kindle store, and, on a Kindle without wifi, get on the internet.

I’ll let you know if I hear more.

If you’ve been doing the r/dd, let me know if it’s changed for you.

This might, I suppose, be connected to us getting the ability to lend books to people not on the account…publishers might (purely hypothetically) have tightened up on this to allow the new lending feature, which we are supposed to have before the end of the year.

UPDATE:  One of the helpful members of Kindle Customer Service, Sean C., responded to my question:

“Kindle content previously downloaded to a device remains on the device even after it has been deregistered. For Kindle reading apps, content can only be read while the app is registered to the account where the content was purchased.”

So, the r/dd doesn’t work for Kindle apps…

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog

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