[Katsunami]

So, you learned it the hard way too by not being able to get to your data. Pity that you had to.

I've just actually tried it my own suggestion. I created an account at the Kobo Store, and looked for a free/cheap book. I found "The Book of Five Rings" by Miyamoto Musashi, which I also have in print, and wish to re-read. The price was € 0.81. Excellent test subject.

1. Bought the book, and got the Adobe ASCM file.
2. Downloaded the book using Digital Editions by dropping the ASCM file into it.
3. Captured the DRM-EPUB from the "\Documents\My Digital Editions" folder and put it into my folder with original files.
4. Imported it into Calibre with the IneptEPUB de-DRM plugin active.
5. Calibre imported it, and could open it.
6. Put the de-DRM'ed version into my "Originals" folder too.
7. Opened the de-DRM'ed EPUB with Sigil (it
s actually very understandable), and extracted the XHTML files, and illustrations.
8. Used a commandline utility to remove all the HTML from the files. (edit: Converting to TXT using Calibre also works very well. Forgot about that for a moment.)

So I am now left with a perfectly clean set of text-files and a set of illustrations, and it will be possible to re-create this eBook in any format that any corporation can dream up, as long as they provide the tools to actually do so.

Oh, and the EPUB -> MOBI conversion works fine on the Kindle.

Now I'm just hoping that I never have to recreate the "Lord of the Rings" eBook myself, somewhere in the future...

I do not know if the text can be dragged out of the AZW/MOBI format this easily after stripping the DRM (which is the hardest part; and thanks to the programmers/hackers for doing that part).

So as said, I think I'm going to stick with EPUB as my archival format, at least for the time being.