An earlier blog post on Gizmodo’s weblog talked about back issues getting deleted on cancelling magazine subscriptions on the Kindle. That means once you’ve done and paid for the magazine, you lose all the previous stuff simply because you no longer pay for the service. Obviously, that’s not a likable feature at all. Fortunately, before the news could create too much of a furor, the statements were refuted by a TeleRead member.
Andrys Basten, a Kindle owner and an enthusiastic reader, states:
I subscribe to a few periodicals and still have old issues I wanted to keep although I cancelled the subscriptions. They remain on that Kindle after cancellation. Mine go back to 2008. ‘Gaby’ or someone relaying bad information to her (the source of the Gizmodo article) is probably confusing inability to GET back issues onto another Kindle or doesn’t understand you need to opt to ‘keep’ very old ones as they pile up.
Andrys explains the process as follows. In the age of Kindle apps, all Kindles on the same account have access to a current issue with the main Kindle getting it on the Home Screen and the others in their Archived-Items folder. Old issues (beyond the last 7 released) are not kept on Amazon servers. If you want to keep them, you have to download them on each Kindle you use to read it.
Amazon does have a periodicals process where it auto-deletes very old issues but not without a warning marking “(!)” that stays for a few days. You can choose to keep this issue forever. The older issues are kept in the Periodicals folder and that’s where you need to look to manage your subscriptions.
Thanks, Andrys for the detailed information. This will really help a lot of our readers with Kindles.
