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I used to buy most of my books in English from Amazon for a very long time, when it was still easy to download and transfer (and remove DRM while at it).
Now I mostly buy from Kobo, not least because I don’t particularly want to give Amazon more money than I absolutely need to, and only very rarely buy from Amazon, generally if there’s a free book recommended or a particularly good deal (and I always check first to make sure there’s still a current method for downloading and disinfecting).
I don’t really buy books any more unless they’re on sale - there’s maybe one series still that I’ve been getting on release (in hardcover), and now that I have a Boox, I’m also using the library more, as well as sharing a local subscription service with my mother (well, she’s subscribed to it, but it explicitly allows two users on two devices) for reading something occasionally in Estonian; I didn’t do that for over a decade and now that I’m older, I feel like .. maybe it’s a good idea to avoid losing my vocabulary, heh. But buying e-books in Estonian is something I can’t really afford, especially since almost everything is just an one-time read to pass the time and entertain me, and I’m not going to re-read.
I’m fine with borrowing and subscription models, when it’s my conscious choice. In that case I choose a book that looks interesting and read it more or less immediately; I have no need to keep it.
I do have to say though that when I’m presented with a button that says “Buy” (not “acquire a license that we may withdraw, or you can lose if our servers go under, or maybe we go out of business and then you can’t read this any more”), then I’m intending to actually keep that copy and be in charge of my own backups as well as converting it to whichever format currently suits me. I realise I’m breaking rules and possibly laws while doing so, but this is something I don’t feel guilt over.
(My “to-read” list of books bought but not yet read probably has well over 1000 books on it, many bought on a whim or back when I was very into one or another genre but didn’t get around to before overdosing. I might never want to read them multiple times, but I’d like my purchased ebooks to still be there if I get around to them some day.)
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