You don't own your Kindle books, Amazon reminds customer

[chopper]

That's when things took a Kafkaesque turn (as documented by her friend, Martin Bekkelund, on his blog). A man named Michael Murphy with Amazon UK's "Executive Customer Relations" told Nygaard her account had been determined to be "directly related to another which has been previously closed for abuse of our policies." Which policies? He wouldn't say. What other account? Murphy wouldn't share that, either.

http://tinyurl.com/93varx5

[cbelt3]

... but they also gave it all back to her after her complaint went viral. Again, still without comment.

... same story for people who 'bought' music under Microsoft's old music store. DRM servers were deactivated, and 'poof', gone.

Moral of story.. if it's virtual property, your actual ownership of it is virtual as well.

[numbered]

Given the fecklessness of Bezos sometimes, I would remind everyone about Calibre, an ebook library manager that seems to work very well. For those so inclined, there are some scripts that can be installed in Calibre that remove Amazon DRM so that the content remains in the Calibre database. You can sync your ereader to Calibre over USB.

Here is an earlier thread on the issue of content ownership and rights to Amazon DRM'd stuff.....

[sekker]

I experienced this with older eReader DRM ebooks. When fictionwise was purchased by B&N, they abandoned support for their eReader app for iOS devices. Then when Amazon purchased the only third-party ebook reader, Stanza, I lost all options to read my books on a modern mobile device (could still read on my ol' Palm OS devices, I suppose!)

So I installed Calibre and made my purchased ebooks now available for use on my iOS devices. It's great.

I'm told there are versions to crack Amazon and current B&N, but haven't needed to do that (yet).

But with this note, I think I'm going to look into it.

[M A V I C]

This is partially why when I buy ebooks, I buy from sources that provide the epub or PDF. They will always be readable.