Quote:
Originally Posted by Rootman
Do these "old" ebooks just go the way of the dodo?
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If you let them do so, yes.
Although in the case of Amazon (and most others), it would take a little more than the company going belly up to render those existing DRMed files useless. Your device would have to unregister itself as well. Should you leave your device in its registered state, you should theoretically be able to read your existing DRMed files for as long as the Amazon device they're on (or app they're in) remain operable. There is no live/constant connection to DRM servers required to read
existing DRMed material. The online presence of Amazon (and most other companies') is only necessary to acquire
new DRMed files (either new purchase or copies of old purchases for migrating to new devices/apps).
Not that I'm endorsing
relying on that if you love keeping your books forever and ever (far from it, in fact). I'm just pointing out that your existing DRMed content (from most of the major retailers of DRMed content, anyway) isn't going to shrivel up and/or crumble to dust the moment the company you bought it from winks out of existence.
Now if you want to move that existing material to a new device/app, then you might be SOL, but that's a different matter.
Short answer is yes: DRMed ebooks are
very much "another disposable media" in their native state. You either deal with that/don't care about that/rail against that/or
change that native state (or some combination of those things). *shrugs*