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Originally Posted by crich70
Very true, but then ebook vendors claim that they only 'license' their ebooks to people. Without warning they can remove ebooks that you have bought from your account. I don't recall any physical bookstore or secondhand bookstore that sends out people to reclaim books that I've purchased in good faith. So how is it stealing if/when I was to do that but not stealing when the ebook vendor decides to remove a book from my account that I have paid for? Especially if they don't give me anything in return. Should they be able to keep the $ that I paid for that book? Isn't taking $ for a product and then taking the product back the equivalent of theft in itself?
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The thing is that ebook vendors don't do that. There are only 2 situations I'm aware of that even resemble this. Sometimes vendors go out of business. Normally, but not always, they make arrangements with other vendors to keep making purchased books available. B&N didn't do that when they shut down in England but most do. Microsoft recently announced they're shutting down their book service and everyone who bought books is getting a full refund.
The other situation was when someone published a pirated version of "1984" on Amazon and when Amazon realized it they deleted those books from people's Kindles. I don't recall if they offered a refund but my guess is they did. They got very bad PR from that and promised to never do it again, and they've kept that promise.
That's not to say a lot of cheating doesn't happen. Read the back of any book or the description of any ebook and you'll soon find that descriptions rarely match the contents of the book very closely. Reviews are a much better guide. And we've all read stories about publishers cheating authors. But in the ways ebook companies have dealt with customers money I think mostly they've been pretty honest.
Barry