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eschwartz... Thank you for your thoughtful replies. I finished rebuilding my library a few minutes ago. I ended up deleting about a dozen all in the 2012-2013 years and fortunately none part of a series I wanted to keep. I now have all 6730 remaining books in epub and one other. I know for a fact they are each Calibre convertible and that I consider secure.
All those deleted were definitely not in the cloud. Some I found after detective work for changed names titles and ASINs. Usually go to Google then a books site and find a link back to Amazon. One author must be totally ashamed of his early work as he changed about everything he could to hide. Found his trail from an old article where he talked about the book and then a later article where they mentioned he renamed it, then finally found it renamed again with his name changed. Got fed up with names like "George Walter Smith", "George W. Smith", "G. W. Smith", "G.W. Smith", "GW Smith" all for the same guy and of course book names changing.
As for UnDRMing, this stuff was in 2012-12 and I was new to Kindle and it was not an issue till much later and then new books were ok. I didn't go back until recently when I finally got so frustrated with K4Android that I started to go to FBReader and epub. When I went back to re-download my early books on K4PC is when I found I had an issue.
As for being defensive, been around a long time and that's a learned behavior from observation. Never been arrested, sued, profiled, etc. In this case ask why does Amazon DRM their books. Why are they changing DRM formats? Am I wrong that they have a counterfeiting (private and public) issue? It would be pretty natural for a person to question why anybody would do it. Some, like me, may simply want to use different devices (even though I have 4 Kindle devices), or like me want to protect their library from Amazon changing formats, dropping books and authors, etc. or like me reread books on a frequent basis. I prefer certain authors and when a new book becomes available in a series I reread others earlier until I'm up to speed then I read the new book.
I learned a new word "conflate" ["Speaking of which, would you mind if I asked you to please stop conflating Kindle Store books with the Kindle ereader?"] which means to fuse or bring together as "to combine (as two readings of a text) into a composite whole." One example is: "Be careful not to conflate gossip with real news." Hmmm... pretty smart fella to use a word like that, and it may apply to this thread. I have to admit that I though we were talking about Kindle ebooks, bought from the Kindle Store - could be wrong.
However my experiences are fact and I learned from them to anticipate future possibilities. Example: That stove burned my finger, maybe the next stove will also. Or Hillary lied in the past, she may lie in the future. Amazon dropped some of my old ebooks from the cloud, they drop others in the future.
In closing..... I love Amazon! It really is my favorite on-line store, books and otherwise. I wouldn't have so many ebooks if not for them and their generous marketing. I have read some authors bashing them for their payment policies but I also started reading quite a few authors that weren't known and sold books for $.99 for a while with lots of freebies. Now they are in the $5-$12 range and I say good for you.
They have generally treated me fair and this DRM thing is the only grip I've had with them since the started. I bought a bunch of books in the mid-90s and loved their 2 day shipping which often came the next day. Course those books had paper and were quite durable.
Now that I can look back on this episode and am confident it won't repeat, at least not the same way, I'm pretty set. I hope all of figure out this stuff and maybe by the time you do I'll have figured out Windows 10, nah - not a chance!
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