A comment made by Mr. Ploppy in
this thread caught my attention. Imagine the scenario where you own a Nook and have purchased hundreds of dollars of epubs from Barnes and Noble. At some point in the future you are in the market for another e-reader and decide to purchase a Kindle. What do you do with the epubs you purchased from Barnes and Noble? This is where the advice I so often see comes in to get Calibre, add the DRM removal extensions, convert the epubs to mobi format, and transfer the converted files to the Kindle.
The question in my mind becomes does Amazon (or flip the scenario around to any other company with a reading device that connects to the cloud) keep track of the fact that there are books on your Kindle device that don't have DRM on them that should? I'm not saying there is anyone actively monitoring what you do in the moment, but simply creating a permanent record via electronic databases that can be retrieved at any point in time in the future.
Would Amazon be interested in this from the perspective that they expect customers to buy ebooks from them in order to make up for selling their hardware below cost? A customer buying from Kobo or Google, breaking DRM, and converting is not good for the business model they set up. Amazon may avoid confronting customers for PR reasons, but maybe an aggressive publisher concerned about piracy would sue Amazon for access to the data? The private decision to use Calibre to remove DRM, may ultimately be public due to the fact that these devices do spy on their users?