oreillykindleAmazon is taking away O’Reilly’s “Send to Kindle feature,” effective tomorrow.

You’ll still be able to download books yourself from the technical publisher’s site and send them to your Kindle. But the one-click feature will vanish.

To cushion the blow, O’Reilly is offering 50 percent off on all e-books today.

But the Amazon’s change—similar to the one against Baen—will go beyond tomorrow.

Major thanks to Michael W. Perry, a publisher and a veteran TeleRead community member, for this tip. Here’s Mike’s interpretation of what’s going on: “This goes into Amazon’s usual hassle-competitors category… This confirms my hunch that those $50 tablets are being sold below cost to increase the consumption of Amazon stuff, so material from other sources must be dried up, perhaps slowly to avoid bad press.”

What’s your own take on this?

5 COMMENTS

  1. @Nate: Thanks. Counts, sort of—as a hidden or semi-hidden feature, assuming it’s indeed still around. [Quoting you:] “It will always work for a limited amount of customers each day depending on the size of the files sent. Once we reach the threshold, which Amazon has not disclosed, they will cut it off. They also have the ability to decrease the amount they let through if we keep hitting the cap. This is why we encourage our customers to use other download methods.” So will the tides and the positions of the planets also count? Oh, the fun strategies of Amazon!

    Update: From Baen site (maybe simplifying things): “Amazon’s Terms of Use does not permit Baen Books to send EBooks directly to your Kindle from the Baen site.” https://www.baenebooks.com/t-ereaderinstructions.aspx

  2. This move by Amazon always seemed like a foregone conclusion. But I noticed that Oreilly implemented an interesting Send to Dropbox solution…. Now the big question to me is: if you use the dropbox app on Kindle to open an unencrypted .mobi file, what app will be used to open it?

  3. Now is really a propitious time for a vendor-neutral (even a DRMed) ereading app to receive digital downloads directly from publishers and bypass this Amazon nonsense. The main reason that publishers haven’t banded together to do this is that publishing companies can’t price the ebook lower than what they allow Amazon to sell it for. But having two reading apps on the same device is what most people do anyway.

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