This is not an anti-Kindle rant. I have purchased (rented?) several Kindle titles myself.
However, YSK that you are only licensing access to the book from Amazon, you don’t own it like a physical book.
There have been cases where Amazon deletes a title from all devices. (Ironically, one version of “1984” was one such title).
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html
There have also been cases where a customer violated Amazon’s terms of service and lost access to all of their Kindle e-books. Amazon has all the power in this relationship. They can and do change the rules on us lowly peasants from time to time.
Here are the terms of use:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201014950
Note, there are indeed ways to download your books and import them into something like Calibre (and remove the DRM from the books). If you do some web searches (and/or search YouTube) you can probably figure it out.
It might not be legal, but in my book, it is perfectly ethical to pirate a copy without DRM if you already own a legitimate copy (paper or DRM-inclusive)
I’m not buying a bunch of paper books and creating unnecessary waste just to make sure the author gets paid. I guess I could donate them but then the author loses sales that way. I’m certainly not rewarding the use of DRM by paying for it.
You can donate books to the library, you know. They’re always looking for more copies of popular books and what they don’t add to their collection, they’ll resell them and use the money for more books.
Paper books aren’t “waste” by any means as they are easily recycled.
Most authors I’ve heard from (through their Internet posts) don’t mind libraries, but they’d rather you enjoy their books legitimately than pirate.