Amazon Kindle owners cannot download their e-books

Many users of Amazon’s Kindle e-readers are unable to download books to their tablets, whether they are new or already owned, according to Good e-Reader and the Amazon forums. Those affected can see the title and cover of a book, but the actual download gets stuck at one percent. Manual troubleshooting measures such as resetting the device seem to have been ineffective so far.

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The issue first attracted attention on Wednesday, when Amazon’s support team blamed “server issues” and said the outage would last “at least” 48 hours, if not longer. That could mean downloads for everyone won’t resume until Friday or Saturday, if not next week. The company hasn’t commented further since then, except to tell two people that it was “currently working to resolve the issues.”

The situation is not only an inconvenience for customers who need more reading material. It could affect Amazon’s e-book sales and therefore the income that many authors depend on. We may not see the full financial impact of the outage any time soon – but Amazon is by far the leading player in the global e-book market, in some cases with over 80% share. For authors, relying on other platforms like Kobo or Apple Books is simply not an option.

What’s going on at Amazon?

There could be deeper problems with the Kindle infrastructure. Just a week ago, Amazon was experiencing bugs with its Send to Kindle feature, which transfers files such as web pages, PDFs and non-Kindle books through the cloud. A message said that files “could not be delivered due to a service error.” Earlier this week, the problems were still present.

One way around the latest bug could be the dedicated Kindle app for iPhone, iPad and Android, as Pocket-lint testing on an iPad showed no issues downloading excerpts or full books. Phones and tablets aren’t always the ideal way to read, of course – most phones have small screens and unless it’s an e-ink reader, a tablet can be too heavy to hold for more than a few minutes.