[A Lurker]

Back in 2018 I purchased about a dozen books from the Kobo website. I downloaded them to my PC's hard drive and imported them into Calibre. I recently lost most of those files and would like to re-download them. (To be clear, I do not have a Kobo device. I am trying to download the files to my laptop, which I was able to do successfully in the past.)

When I log into the Kobo website I see my previous purchases. The thumbnail for each book has three dots in the lower right corner. When I click on those dots it brings up a menu that includes a "download" option. When I click on that it brings up a dialog box that tells me I'm about to download a DRM epub file. Perfect. That's exactly what I want! Easy-peasy.

But when I click "download file" it does not download an epub file. Instead it downloads an .acsm file, whatever that is. Specifically it downloads: "URLLink.acsm". I've tried all dozen books in my Kobo library and gotten the same frustrating result.

When I click on "read now" I am able to pull up the books in my browser. However, when I click on "details" I got a 404 error that says: "Sorry, this item is no longer available. You can look for other items by this author or about this topic using the search bar above." Does Kobo have a policy that if a book you previously purchased is later removed from the store, it will no longer be available to re-download?

Has anyone else experienced this? Does anyone thing there could be another reason (besides the book no longer being for sale) that's preventing me from re-downloading them?

I could be mistaken, but I believe any books you purchase from Amazon are available to re-download in perpetuity, even if the seller removes it from the store.