Using the treetrum Amazon Kindle Bulk Downloader on macOS

The clock is ticking on downloading backup copies of your Amazon Kindle books. You have through Feb. 26.

Just in time, I happened to see Jack mention Sam Davis’s Amazon Kindle 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.

Here’s what I did to get it working on a MacBook running Sequoia:

First, make sure you see the pre-requisites about having a physical Kindle or Fire Tablet of the right (not too new) vintage.

In Terminal, go to whatever folder you clone repos to. I use a code folder in my home directory:

cd ~/code

Clone the repo to that folder:

git clone https://github.com/treetrum/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader.git

Install Bun by going to https://bun.sh/docs/installation – I did the plain option:

curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash

Open a new Terminal window and check your Bun version:

bun --version

This next part is important. You have to go the folder where the Amazon Kindle Bulk Downloader is installed:

cd ~/code/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader

Then install the dependencies the bulk downloader needs:

bun install

Look at all the files in that folder:

ls -all

You’ll see an .env.template file. You could copy that file to an .env file and customize it with your Amazon username, password, and one-time-password, but I didn’t have good luck getting that to work. I did this instead and logged in manually. I’m using a baseUrl of https://www.amazon.com :

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

After you put in your username and password and authenticate with either your Amazon iOS app or with a 6-digit code, Google Chrome for Testing will appear to hang for a minute or so while Amazon figures out who you are. Don’t bail out. Once you’re in, you’ll see your digital content items.

Now flip back to Terminal and you’ll see a prompt in bold that says:

✔ Press enter once you've logged in

Press Enter.

Then you’ll see:

✔ Select a Kindle device (note, eink devices are preferred)

Select your device and hit Enter.

Then all of your stuff will download super fast to the ~/code/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader/downloads folder.

Wow! Now go save all those downloaded books somewhere safe. You should extract every cent of value out of what you’ve already paid Bezos for. He can suck it.

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