Using Kindle for Mac 1.29.0 on my MacBook Pro 16-in. 2019, I am having a very hard time highlighting and copying text.
Most of the time trying to highlight by dragging doesn’t work, then for no apparent reason it does, but when I try to move the cursor to click Copy in the popup menu suddenly the menu and highlighting go away.
Anyone doing this successfully who could give me some tips?
Thank you,
David
I think Amazon block it, the same issue arises in a browser if you use https://read.amazon.com to access your Kindle Library. I would imagine there are workarounds for the browser, but the Kindle app I wouldn’t be so sure.
It’s because you bought the the right to read a Kindle book, not to own the the digital file. It’s not in the interest of either the publishers of digital books, Amazon or authors to allow people to make copies of copyrighted material the company or author owns. The person who copied something from the digital file could easily share it, or a whole book, with many others. It’s why publishers, Amazon, Apple and other eBook retailers limit the number of people you can share eBooks with. Some don’t allow sharing of certain books at all. If you buy a PDF copy of a book, it’s typical for it to be an uneditable or uncopyable version. But when you buy a book that’s made of paper and cardboard, you own the physical materials and can share or sell it however you want. The fact that it’s extremely expensive to copy a book printed on paper is a deterrent enough for illegal sales.
If the info you want to copy is in the Kindle app on an iPad, Mac or iPhone, a screen shot of the page might work, but I’m guessing about this.
While you’ll not find me advocating for copyright infringement, I would say that the app Calibre with the KFX plugin does load and convert Kindle files to PDF etc. You could probably copy within that.
Kindle for Mac allows you to copy text. (I copy it to make notes.)
The problem I have is that I can’t consistently highlight text I want to copy – sometimes it works but most of the time it doesn’t.
Copying text in Kindle for Mac is not blocked – I just can’t get it to work consistently.
To answer my own question, it turns out that the problem was the particular Kindle book I was reading. With the one I’m reading now it’s very easy to highlight and copy text (or add a note), and when I have gone back to the other one it is as difficult as it was before.