The latest generation, Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle Scribe 2, Kindle Scribe 1, and Kindle and the upcoming Kindle Colorsoft, all have something in common. When you plug them into USB into your PC or MAC, they no longer appear as external drives. This prevents users from using file managers to back up their books or to sideload new books onto the Kindle. Amazon has also removed the download and transfer via USB option for purchased ebooks from the content page. This will likely prevent people from striping the DRM from the books and sharing them on piracy websites. This is not
Yeah, I try to avoid Amazon as well, and just cancelling Prime went a long way toward motivating me to shop elsewhere. But we still order from Amazon a fair amount (far less than before we cancelled Prime), it just takes a bit longer.