Important

As of 26th February 2025, Amazon has removed the ability to download backups of your Kindle books. Unfortunately, this means that this tool is no longer functional.

Thank you to everyone who helped triage issues, contributed code, and provided support to others. The amount of traffic this tool received in the week before the shutdown was quite staggering, and I wouldn’t have been able to help quite as many people without the help of the community.

Thank you all!
Sam

Amazon Kindle eBook Bulk Downloader

Designed for downloading your Kindle eBooks in a more automated fashion than is typically permitted, this tool allows you to create backup copies of the books you've already purchased.

Pre-Requisites

The most important pre-requisite is that you have a physical e-ink Kindle or an Amazon Fire Tablet linked to your Amazon account. This is a requirement from Amazon's side and this tool does not offer a way to bypass this.

An important distinction is that the physical Kindle you have linked cannot be one of the latest 2024 models. For whatever reason, Amazon has decided to block the ability to download books from these devices. This tool will not work with these devices.

The easiest way to check if this tool will work for you is to log into your Amazon account manually and navigate to Manage Your Content and Devices. From there when clicking on More Actions > Download & Transfer via USB on a book, you should see your Kindle or Fire Tablet device listed. If you see the message You do not have any compatible devices registered for this content then it means you:

1. either don't have a Kindle or Fire Tablet device linked to your account, OR
2. have a Kindle or Fire Tablet device that is not compatible with this tool

If you are able to proceed to the next screen and download the book, then this tool should work for you.

Setup

You need to have Bun installed before you can run this too. Please see here for the most up to date instructions for your system: https://bun.sh/docs/installation

Once Bun is installed, clone this repository, and run the following command from the root of the downloaded repository to install dependencies.

bun install

Tip

You may need to restart your prompt (terminal, PowerShell, etc) before calling the bun install command

Then run the following command to install a special version of chrome for use by this tool

bunx puppeteer browsers install chrome

Running

Note that amazon credentials will need to be provided. Currently this script expects them to be in the following ENV variables:

Variable	Description	Required
AMAZON_USER	Account username	Yes
PASSWORD	Account password	Yes
OTP	6 digit one-time password	If 2 factor auth is enabled

Note this tool is already configured to read environment variables from an .env file in the root of the repo. You can make a copy of the .env.template file called .env and fill in your details there for an easy way to get started.

CLI Arguments

The following CLI arguments are made available to customise the downloader to your needs

Argument	Default Value	Description
--baseUrl	N/A (Will be prompted if not provided)	Which Amazon base URL to use. Note, this MUST include www. in order to work properly
--totalDownloads	Infinity	Total number of downloads to do
--maxConcurrency	10	Maximum number of concurrent downloads
--startFromOffset	0	Index offset to begin downloading from. Allows resuming of previous partially finished attempts.
--manualAuth	false	Allows user to manually login using the pupeteer UI instead of automatically using ENV vars. Use when auto login is not working.
--duplicateHandling	skip	How to handle files of the same name/size on the filesystem. Options: skip, overwrite
--searchPhrase		Search phrase to filter books by
--searchPhraseDirs	false	If set to true, downloaded books will be saved to a sub-directory named after the search phrase within the downloadsDir
--downloadsDir		Overrides the default downloads directory
--skipBooksMatching		If a book title contains this phrase, don't attempt to download it. Case sensitive. Useful for skipping books that crashes. Can be provided multiple times for multiple skip options.

Running

You can run this tool using the following command

bun run start

Command line arguments can be provided as follows

bun run start --baseUrl "https://www.amazon.com.au"

Docker

See Docker instructions here

Troubleshooting

If you're having any issues with the tool, please first ensure that you have the latest version of the code by running git pull or redownloading the repository and then running bun install from the root of the repository.

In addition, please ensure that you have followed the pre-requisites section carefully and can download a book manually through the website.

Common Errors

Error: Found 0 books in total

This error may indicate that you are authenticated to the wrong Amazon account for your locale.

You need to ensure that you provide the base URL for the Amazon region where your purchases were made. For example, if you are in Australia, you should use https://www.amazon.com.au, if you are in the USA, you should use https://www.amazon.com, etc.

This base URL should be provided as a CLI argument when running the tool. For example:

# For USA based accounts
bun run start --baseUrl "https://www.amazon.com"

# For Australia based accounts
bun run start --baseUrl "https://www.amazon.com.au"

# ... etc.

Error: 404 errors when downloading books

From my testing, 404 errors on book downloads largely occur when the tool is attempting to download an item that is simply not downloadable. From what I can tell, this includes certain comic book purchases. Users with comic book libraries and knowledge of javascript are encouraged to contribute to the project to help test and fix this issue.

There has also been an indication that 404s can ocurr when a book is present on too many devices. If that's the case, you can try deleting the book of some of your devices and try the tool again.

Error: Failed to parse CRSF token

This indicates that your login did not fully succeed. There are a multitude of reasons why this could happen however the simplest fix is often to login using the --manualAuth CLI flag instead of using the automated process.

Error: Script not found "start" when running bun run start

This error occurs when you are running bun run start from outside the root of the repository. You need to be in the root of the repository to run this command.

After cloning the you will need to change directory (cd) into the repo folder by doing:

cd amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader

After which you should be able to run the following without getting errors.

bun install
bun run start

All downloads are ~100kb files that are not valid books

The 100kb files are actually error web pages instead of book files and likely indicates that the book files were purchased in another region (even if they show up!).

See here for original report of this.

The fix is to ensure the correct baseUrl is passed for the region that the books were purchased in.

Error: [ERR_REQUIRE_ESM]: Must use import to load ES Module

This appears to be when you've got an older version of Node installed on your system.

Whilst this tool doesn't explicitly require Node (Bun is an alternative), it seems that having a Node version older than v16 on your computer can cause issues.

If you experience this, try upgrading your local Node version to >= v16 and see if that helps.

HUGE thanks to @keithzg in #145 for the investigation work done on this front.

Crashes when encountering certain books

If the program always crashes on a specific book, I recommend using the --skipBooksMatching flag to exclude that book from being downloaded. This may help with out of memory issues, etc. You can then attempt to download the problematic book manually from the browser.

Note, this flag can be provided multiple times to skip books matching one of any number of matching phrases.

I.e. given a list of the following books:

• The Lord of the Rings
• The Hobbit
• The Silmarillion

If you provided the following skip arguments:

bun run start --skipBooksMatching "Hobbit" --skipBooksMatching "Silmarillion"

Only "The Lord of the Rings" would actually get downloaded.