sure, But so far, that's not really how amazon operates; I mean, when I hook up my kindle I can actually copy most (maybe all? I haven't checked exhaustively) of the books off the kindle on to my computer, and then restore them back to the kindle later; even if amazon does delete the books off my kindle, if I put any effort into backups (which I don't, 'cause amazon removing a book is excessively rare) - I would still have the files. (how useful those would be would depend on the level of DRM applied to it, which I understand is controlled by the publisher and varies by book.)
That, and if you are giving up the convenience of the amazon ecosystem, why would you pay extra for books from amazon? The amazon kindle is one of the most expensive ways to get books, and the value proposition is that it's super easy and convenient, and sure, I'll pay extra for a super convenient book ecosystem. If you are willing to deal with inconveniences, there's much cheaper ways to do it. Hell, I think buying used physical copies and sending the book to the destructive book scan place is often cheaper than buying new (the only option) for the kindle.
Yeah, I've got a A4-sized reader for scientific papers and other things that come in PDFs that are sized for a full page. But the vast majority of my paper books have pages closer to the size of a kindle screen than a A4 sheet of paper.
OCR is another solution.
I mean, I'm not arguing that these other solutions aren't way inferior to just buying the e-book direct from amazon; I was just trying to make the point that living in the amazon ecosystem is a much more expensive way to consume books than just buying used books.
That, and if you are giving up the convenience of the amazon ecosystem, why would you pay extra for books from amazon? The amazon kindle is one of the most expensive ways to get books, and the value proposition is that it's super easy and convenient, and sure, I'll pay extra for a super convenient book ecosystem. If you are willing to deal with inconveniences, there's much cheaper ways to do it. Hell, I think buying used physical copies and sending the book to the destructive book scan place is often cheaper than buying new (the only option) for the kindle.