Backing up your Kindle books in 2024

Backing up your Kindle books is still quite possible as of February 2024. I spent like 3h digging through all the guides online and am documenting my final result. I do not condone piracy in any way and my use case for backing up to EPUB is 1) to keep my purchased content available in case Kindle is ever down and 2) I want to index the book contents for a RAG system so I can go back and ask questions about the book contents for personal recall.

Converting your Kindle book to EPUB

1. Download Kindle for PC (I used v2.3)

   1. Download the purchased books you want to back up

   2. Find your content folder

      1. Default: C:\Users\YOU\Documents\My Kindle Content

      2. Find in Kindle app: Tools > Options… > Content

2. Download latest Calibre (I used Windows v7.5.1)

3. Download the noDRM plugin (I used v10.0.9)

4. Download the latest KFX-Input plugin from the Calibre Plugin List (I used v2.8.1)

5. Open Calibre

   1. Open Preferences > Plugins. Click Load plugin from file.

      1. noDRM release is a .zip, unzip it to see DeDRM_plugin.zip inside

      2. The KFX-Input download is the right .zip itself

6. Restart Calibre

7. Now you should be able to visit your My Kindle Content folder found in step 1.b and drag the .azw file into Calibre to import it.

8. Finally, export to .epub without DRM:

   1. Right click the book in Calibre, then Convert books > Convert individually

   2. In the convert window, change Output format to EPUB (or whatever)

   3. Click OK

9. Selecting the book in Calibre will now show two hyperlinks: KFX and EPUB

10. Right click EPUB > Copy > Path to File