Quote:
Originally Posted by Scott Nielsen
I just hope that neither company every goes out of business or that, if they were, I would then have legal means of ensuring my purchased content could be read on other devices.
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You may hope this, but experience has shown that it's a false hope.
It's not necessary for Amazon to go out of business for your DRMed ebooks to become unreadable. Amazon can be in business selling Kindles and DRMed ebooks, and you can still lose access to your DRMed ebooks.
- Publisher loses rights to book - either a fixed term contract, or the author invokes a reversion clause.
- Your Kindle breaks and you get a new Kindle
- You can't download your book again, because it's no longer available in the Kindle store.
- You can't use your back-up version, because its DRM doesn't match your new Kindle.
A similar thing recently really happened with Fictionwise - one of their suppliers stopped supplying them, and customers with books from that supplier could no longer download new copies.
If you want to keep your ebooks for the long term, you have two choices.
- don't buy DRMed ebooks
- strip the DRM