That button should say "Rent this book".
Claiming you can "Buy this book" is a lie and false advertising.
Claiming you can "Buy this book" is a lie and false advertising.
Is it really fine for them to say "Buy this book *You aren't really buying it"? I guess we've seen "No bandwidth caps *We can arbitrarily cap your bandwidth". Could a food manufacturer say "Contains no nuts *Made on an assembly line that produces nut products"?
It's okay to lie to people, just not that much. Corporations don't operate above the law, they operate X% below the law where that % grows the larger they are because the cost to prosecute X% is too high, so all of them do it.
After reading about how they're taking away downloads I went and downloaded all of my books and found that at some point they must have lost the license to that book because I no longer had access to it.
Love it when my "purchases" can be taken away from me with no recourse. edit: and I was never even informed that the book had been taken away. It just is there in my collection with a few invalid characters at the front of the title and no cover picture. The link goes to a page that doesn't exist. And searching for it shows only paper copies now by third parties. So I know this isn't just a bug in the system.
Anything you've purchased will remain in your library unless:
1) You delete it (which can happen by accident, due to some bad UX).
If you have done this, you can contact Amazon Support and they can re-add it to your library for free. It's not possible to delete your purchase history on the Amazon website, and that includes all Kindle books.
Whenever I've seen people claim that digital content has gone from their Amazon account, it always turns out to be either:
a) They didn't buy it on Amazon in the first place.
b) They bought it on a different Amazon account.
It has, in fact, happened: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...
Not saying that's what happened in this case, but it has happened, and it's a great example of why having your books (or any media) locked up in a walled garden is a terrible idea. (though this is far from being the only objectionable angle)
And Amazon gave everyone a full refund.
I'm glad the government is forcing companies to be a little more honest about these "purchases." These companies wouldn't have done it on their own.
Of course, someone will say it is government overreach and competition will solve this instead.