This is not an anti-Kindle rant. I have purchased (rented?) several Kindle titles myself.
However, YSK that you are only licensing access to the book from Amazon, you don’t own it like a physical book.
There have been cases where Amazon deletes a title from all devices. (Ironically, one version of “1984” was one such title).
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html
There have also been cases where a customer violated Amazon’s terms of service and lost access to all of their Kindle e-books. Amazon has all the power in this relationship. They can and do change the rules on us lowly peasants from time to time.
Here are the terms of use:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201014950
Note, there are indeed ways to download your books and import them into something like Calibre (and remove the DRM from the books). If you do some web searches (and/or search YouTube) you can probably figure it out.
I remember an email I sent to Randall Munroe once, asking where I can buy his ebook “What if” without DRM.
He emailed me back that unfortunately there is no place to buy it without DRM, because of the publisher, but he also linked this comic in his email:
https://xkcd.com/488/
Here’s a DRM-free copy for sale:
It’ll look like this:
Once you buy this, it is truly yours. Nobody can take it away from you. You don’t have to agree to any EULA to read it. No account needed, no activation, no sign-up. You can even resell your copy if you want. There are no technical restrictions on it whatsoever. You can enjoy it any time of day, anywhere in the world, and there’s no need for an Internet connection.
They asked for a DRM-free ebook. Of course a physical book lacks digital rights management.
It didn’t say “e-book” when I originally wrote the reply
I enjoy reading dead tree books as much as anyone, and whilest the publisher/distributor can’t take it away, there are plenty of ways you can lose access to them. Fire and flood being the two obvious ones, whereas digital books can be backed up offsite. It’s also easier to carry many books when they’re digital compared to physical.
For books I care about I try to get both a physical and a (drm free) digital copy for the best of both world.