Amazon is a horrible company
Since Amazon announced they would kill the download & USB function of their ebook store on February 26th, I've been saving all my ebooks and comics and PDF files I've uploaded to my devices. I'm not surprised the website and the entire process is slow. My old Kindle devices are working harder than they ever have processing these files!
I had to reboot them just to get them going over and over after being stuck or frozen. Missing covers reminds me of the old MP3 files we used to get missing metadata! I keep telling myself not to worry, future self will fix it. Future self will figure out the DRM errors on these files. Today it's all about backing up!
So now I have backups of backups of these ebooks. My wife's ebooks and mine. We miss physical books but our allergies to dust forced us to downsize our collection unfortunately.
The horrible part of this company and other tech companies, they are back in the closed ecosystem mindspace. Similar to what Microsoft did back in the 90s. Services and devices so locked down that when consumers want to leave, they can't. Amazon would prefer they make you buy their devices to read ebooks purchased from their store. I'm sure if they could kill their phone apps, they would. Apple seemed to be the company we always talked about when it came to closed ecosystems, but many big tech companies are making it harder to move your data and services to another company or even self-host. More reason to focus on open source and foss solutions first before signing up with these big tech companies.
If you haven't saved your ebook collection that you purchased over the years, go do it now. Next week it will be too late when you're reading future articles about this missing function.