Amazon removed books from my Kindle

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by issybird

The books I bought were going to be there to download to a tied device when I got around to them.

That's exactly what I don't want to rely on. I might decide to get a device other than a Kobo or a Kindle someday (for example, as things currently stand, there is no eink Kindle I'd want to read on - I can't stand the symmetrical, buttonless design). Plus, I reread, and I certainly don't want to buy all my favorites again.

YMMV.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by issybird

But I want to differentiate between buying ahead and backing up, two very different things. I stopped backing up when I was still in full acquisition mode when I had a lightbulb moment. I realized that the volatile ebook market had settled into essentially two purveyors, Kobo and Kindle, and that neither was going anywhere. The books I bought were going to be there to download to a tied device when I got around to them. That was the end of backing up, for me.

For me, one of the main reasons for backing up is that I've edited 99% of the ebooks in my library. For most books, it takes less than 5 minutes to generate an edited copy that fits my preferences. Drop caps, extra space between paragraphs, chapter headers that take half a page for blank space, embedded body fonts, etc. go away. Yes, the result is, typographically speaking, very boring (just a few short steps above reading a text document) but I look for excitement in the content not in the font and layout.

I realize that what takes me 5 minutes with the experience from 15 years of using Sigil and my collection of saved searches could take others much longer. And I am very thankful to Strahinja Val Marković, John Schember, Kevin Hendricks and Doug Massay for their work on Sigil.

Even if Kobo or Amazon still have the books available, it would take me more hours than I care to think about to recreate my edited copies. This, for me, makes backups a necessity. And since the backups are driven by a batch file spawned by a task scheduler entry, I don't need to do much other than a random test restore.

[haertig]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I would argue that buying ahead allows me to take advantage of special offers and so save money.

I was going to say something to this effect. That buying ahead usually gives you access to more sales and discounts.

But then I thought, hmmm, I've bought quite a few books using sales and discounts. And many of them are still in my TBR pile. A sale book sitting in my TBR pile is technically a loss, and not a savings - until I actually read it.

I didn't think I'd be able to debate my way out of that hole I dug for myself, so I decided not to mention the benefit of sale prices when buying ahead. Too many excellent debaters on this forum that would have caught me on that one!

[TheSmitty]

I have always backed up my books. I have .LIT books (remember those?), that fortunately I had backed up and since converted to epub. A few of them are books that are out of print and no longer available in any ebook format.