I’ve got an update to this problem.
I spoke with a Kobo agent today that was extremely helpful. She didn’t assume I had no idea which end of the eReader was up or down. She looked at the previous chats, and she verified for herself that the book in question was purchased, but not in my library. So she deleted and restored the book, then I repaired my Elipsa and voilà. Hello, book. At least I thought. Now it showed up in my library on my Elipsa, but I couldn’t download it. The Elipsa said I had run out of room. The Elipsa was full with 26GB of space remaining. 🙄 Here are some screenshots:
Books borrowed from the library also stopped syncing to the device. The tech was leaning towards replacing my device and was escalating the matter with her team, so I had nothing to lose and enabled the Dev mode, then factory reset to the original firmware.
Now I am up and running again, and library books and purchases all download correctly, but my notebooks are gone. A little known fact is that when you do a factory reset, your notebooks disappear.
At any rate, the purchasing issue seems to have been fixed, but then I thought that was the case on Friday night when the books started to disappear the next day. I will watch and see how my Elipsa functions over the next few days and report back here.
If this was a matter of a corrupt firmware install, then this isn’t an Elipsa issue at all, though this was quite the odd bug i’ve only ever encountered on an Elipsa. And for the record, I had not installed nickel menu or any other third-party apps.