Amazon e-readers unable to download content for a day or more • The Register

Amazon Kindle owners looking for something new to read probably had to buy a real book — the old one made from dead trees — one day this week because their devices wouldn’t download the content.

User complaints first surfaced on July 3, and reports indicate that Amazon responded by suggesting it could take 48 hours for downloads to resume.

Register We used the Kindle app on Android to check that the service was working again on the evening of July 4th US time – and downloaded the e-book we received for $0.99.

But the incident may not be completely resolved. We spoke to an Amazon support agent who told us, “We have received a large number of calls regarding downloading content to Kindle devices” and that Amazon technicians are “currently working on it.”

It is unclear what caused the booktastrofa. Amazon’s e-bookstore has not changed much in recent years and Register could find no evidence of a recent feature release that might have gone wrong. Perhaps an internal code change went wrong – a common cause of cloud outages.

This incident isn’t the only recent disruption to the Kindle ecosystem. Amazon offers a feature called “Send to Kindle,” which relies on the fact that each physical Kindle and Kindle app has a unique email address, so users can send DRM-free documents or e-books to Kindle accounts — when the service is up and running.

But in late June, Send to Kindle faltered for several days. And there were other incidents, although most were brief.

Amazon dominates the e-book and e-reader market, so problems with its service have implications for the broader publishing industry—another example of the online retailer’s colossal market power. ®