[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by Liviu_5

The difference is that e-books are not sold whatever you may believe but licensed.

In the Kindle case, Amazon has the right to restrict selling Kindle to the US because they would be liable for warranty and even claims of limited functionality anywhere else - whispernet anyone? - and they just do not want the hassle and expense. But resellers can and do sell Kindles to anyone and everyone, just that you take your chances and accept the limited capability.

Try and resell Hachette ebooks and see what will happen...

Ebooks are not owned by anyone other then the publisher, they are licensed to you for a shorter or longer period of time and anyone pretending anything else is in denial if the belief is sincere...

The e-media examples of terminating the license by closing drm servers, pulling items off virtual shelves and so on are too numerous so far to list, so just live with it and do not whine

How have I been whining?

You "buy" ebooks, that's what you get, so accept it, make your own plans how to deal with it and forget it... Conversion and redundant backups is one way...

I would like to say your statement was wrong, but it is actually less than complete.

You cannot assume in absolute terms that the ebook was licensed rather than sold because the assumption under US law is that a transaction is a sale, not a license. There are previous US Supreme Court decisions on this.

For a copyrighted work to be licensed but not sold, the fact that the transaction is not a sale needs to be made clear at the time it occurs. Last I checked, BoB does not do this.