You don’t own the e-books you buy on Amazon’s Kindle store. You simply own a license to view the content at your leisure, and Amazon can revoke the license for whatever reason it chooses. However, there’s a small spot of hope for people who want to own the things they buy. Amazon will allow users to download some books starting in 2026, though only if a publisher offers its own approval.

You can read more about Kindle’s policy change on its DRM (digital rights management) support page. Starting on Jan. 20 next year, “verified purchasers can download the EPUB or PDF files of your confirmed DRM-free books.” That acronym is a catch-all term for any software limitation that restricts users from reselling or otherwise manipulating copyrighted works. Good e-Reader (via Android Police) first spotted the change in policy.

Back in February, Amazon closed a loophole that allowed users to download Kindle books and send them to other e-readers. This “Download & transfer via USB” feature in tandem with older e-book formats allowed some users to then hack the files, changing their format to make them accessible on other devices. Sure, the tool was certainly used for book piracy, though other users simply wanted to access books they already—ostensibly—owned on their choice of device.

Now, Amazon is putting the onus on book publishers to decide whether users should be able to own their e-books, at least in the traditional sense of the word “own.” Starting early next year, users can download either EPUB or PDF via the Manage Your Content and Devices page on Amazon’s website. This won’t work if you’re reading these e-books via a Kindle Unlimited subscription. The new DRM rules state that if you download an e-book and the publisher changes its mind, you’ll still maintain control of that copy even if you can’t download it anymore.

This will be a positive change for any lingering Kindle readers with big libraries. Amazon’s latest devices, like the $280 Kindle Colorsoft and the $630 Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, are more expensive than some other e-reader alternatives, so this is a win for smaller e-reader brands as well. Now, the only lingering question is which publishers will be willing to offer PDF access to their books.

If you consider how fast the publishing industry went after the Internet Archive for daring to create a public online repository of books and journals, there may be few authors and publishers willing to enable free digital downloads. The Association of American Publishers (AAP), a trade group representing the big five major publishing houses, successfully sued the Internet Archive for copyright infringement. At least, in the words of founder Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive “survived” the lawsuit, even if the library didn’t.

AAP wrote after the case settled late last year, “The public interest… is served best when authors and their publisher licensees can decide the terms on which they make their works available.” Gizmodo reached out to several of the major publishing houses for comment on plans for book downloads, and we’ll update this post if we hear back.

Even if Amazon is pushing responsibility onto the publishers, at least it may mean we can finally feel some small, incremental sense of ownership.