Man, seeing the hassle that you and (apparently many if not most) other BN users are going thru, just makes me want to avoid buying ebooks from BN altogether. Although that doesn't apply to paper books--I still really like their bricks-n-mortar stores.

This kind of reinforces the impression I got about 5 years ago that caused me to stop buying ebooks from them in the first place. They were always more persnickety and controlling about how you could use purchased ebooks across your devices, than other places I bought from. I vaguely remember that they would associate a specific ebook you buy with a specific registered PC, and then it was hard or impossible to download that book later to another PC. You had to go through a rather inconvenient transfer process to update the association between book and PC--get your 'key', put it on the new PC, etc. I remember having trouble with this before when I retired an old PC and wanted to re-download my ebooks to the new one (that was before I had everything in Calibre, was just starting to use it at that time--now, I immediately download and liberate every purchased book and store a permanent copy in Calibre :-)). It sounds like now, this whole problem has gotten even worse, complicated by the fact they are phasing out support for some apps/platforms.

The thing is, when you get ebooks from their big leading competitors like Amazon, Google Play, Kobo/Walmart, etc., you don't see this degree of problems with accessing your purchased ebooks. It's entirely unnecessary to be so restrictive, and will only hurt BN sales in the long run.