[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by jmstruwe

Spoiler:

I experienced the loss of a large number of books from my 10th generation Kindle - all purchased and downloaded from my Amazon account directly to my Oasis - at about the time this thread began. They were definitely removed by Amazon.

I have a very large Amazon library. At the time of the incident it numbered approximately 21,000 volumes with purchase dates going back to 2012. I had downloaded nearly all of them to my Oasis. While all of my books have been purchased, most of them cost $0.00. Long story short, while downloading and organizing books on my Oasis I noticed that I had recently purchased a new copy of a book I had purchased a few years earlier. I selected the "Delete permanently" option for the older file. A few moments later books began vanishing from my Kindle. In the end over 14,000 books were removed from my device. Amazon Support was less than helpful and said I must have hit "Delete permanently" instead of "Remove download" on each of these books individually.

Sometime in 2020 or 2021 Amazon copied everyone's Kindle libraries from wherever they exist on the account to "the cloud" and now when you access your library from the device I believe it communicates exclusively with the cloud copy. When I told my Kindle to permanently delete a book purchased a few years earlier it did, but it also deleted the references to all volumes purchased prior to that volume from the cloud copy of my library. They are still in my Amazon account library and I can access them online and send them to my devices. Reading progress on these books will sync between devices but when I assign collections on the device I receive a message that the file was uploaded from a computer and the changes will not sync with the library.

According to the support rep, most Kindle users have a library of maybe a dozen volumes and they permanently delete each book after reading it. If that is the case, I doubt the developers did testing on a large library with a decade's worth of purchases, so the removal of all purchases dated up to and including the item specified for permanent deletion went unnoticed. Unfortunately there was nobody to tell.

Again, never rely on someone else to keep and manage your library, least of all the store where you purchased them. Download your books, remove the DRM and make your own back-ups. That's the only way to be certain your books won't disappear someday.

Of course, that's assuming you're interested in backing up your books at all. Not everyone is.