The chance that Amazon disappears in a manner that you lose the rights to books you have purchased is negligible. Amazon won’t just go bust, it’s far too big. There are plausible paths to it being broken up, with parts sold off, but it will not simply vanish. Such a vast number of consumers are involved that if there were any hint of them just losing what they have paid for to the quirks of DRM, consumer regulatory agencies would surely get involved.
If you like owning physical books that’s fine, but there’s no rational basis for this scaremongering about digital books.
What software (and what version) are you using? The key step is to download the actual book file from “the cloud” onto your laptop and locate where the software puts it. Once it’s there, if it’s encrypted that can probably be removed, and the resulting file should be portable to all your reading devices.
Certainly, if you can view the file on your screen it is possible to capture the image, print it out, or whatever. I take this as further evidence that DRM schemes are simply there to annoy and inconvenience users and not to magically prevent “unauthorized use” of books.
Capturing and saving or printing an entire ebook screen-by-screen sounds like a tedious process, not worth the time and effort to do so. If I were an unscrupulous person who didn’t care about the legal or ethical ramifications, I might well make copies of DRM-free ebooks to keep, sell, or give away, but I wouldn’t do so with DRM-enabled ebooks unless there were a much easier way than this.
Hence, IMHO it’s silly to consider this “evidence that DRM schemes are simply there to annoy and inconvenience users and not to magically prevent ‘unauthorized use’ of books.” That’s kind of like saying that, because locks can be picked and windows broken, locks on doors are simply there to annoy and inconvenience people and not to magically prevent unauthorized access. Some forms of security aim at making it practically impossible to subvert them; but others just aim at making it more trouble than it’s worth for the vast majority of would-be offenders.
(I’m still not a fan of DRM, and there’s an argument to be made that the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. But there are advantages.)
I hear what you are saying, and admit it is not direct evidence nor a smoking gun, but I would be surprised if, barring doublethink, the advocates of including DRM in their own products genuinely believe it deters anything at all or has advantages.
Copying an e-book page by page is straightforward yet tedious, much less tedious if you automate the process, and there are easier ways to remove DRM from an e-book, like running one of the open-source tools that do it for you. It may be more trouble than it is worth for some potential “offenders” who want to read their books on a competitor’s device, back them up, or sell them, but it’s not much trouble, and it only annoys legitimate users, unlike a door lock. This is all well known, and furthermore there is a long track record of public DRM disasters like this one combined with proven zero effectiveness against actual pirates and plagiarists, which is why I suspect (only suspect- I have no leaked internal memos) that corporate claims that DRM has advantages for one’s customers are insincere.
Yes, the problem is with DRM, not digital books, digital movies, digital music, digital software, or anything else. I’ve been using digital books almost exclusively for more than 20 years, and digital music for nearly 30. People don’t need to be scared of digital books, just digital books with DRM.
Have the people here that hate digital books tried them? I’m asking seriously. Just like giving my kid some unfamiliar food, if she tries it and doesn’t like it, who am I to say she is wrong? But it’s the ones who ignore the many benefits because it isn’t what they’re used to that I have a problem with. This is mostly going by my experience 20 some years ago with people asking why I was staring at my Palm Pilot for an entire flight. When I would tell them I was reading a book, they would immediately go off on all these things about how book smell is part of the reading process, or whatever.