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They're removing the button to download the book to your computer from their website.

If you buy a Kindle book, or borrow a digital book from your library, you could then use the "Download and Transfer with USB" button to get the file on your device. You'd then use Calibre and the DeDRM plugin to remove the DRM.

I keep my Kindles in airplane mode most of the time because otherwise Amazon tries to change the covers on all the books you've sideloaded.

And deletes them too.

No. They're removing the ability to download the books from their website in a format which can be manually put onto the device.

If you get ebooks from places other than them, you can still manually transfer them to a Kindle, regardless of whether the Kindle is online or not.

Will you still be able to use Calibre to copy your books from your Kindle to Calibre via USB? I like to backup.

Presumably, yes. I will at least try to do so.