To clarify this, there was a statement that indicated that deregistering a Kindle would remove the content. As mentioned in the post, I tested that, and the content was not removed. Amazon also changed the language.

However, that is not the same with a Kindle Fire. When you deregister a Kindle Fire, you will not be able to read the Kindle Store books you downloaded to it. I’d have to check to see if the files are removed, or if they just can’t be opened. I’m not in a good place to check this right now…I believe the books will not show up on the Books tab on a Kindle Fire after you deregister.

Yes, that confirms what I said in my testing in the post to which you responded (which is from 2011, by the way).

That is not true for the Kindle Fire, which was released after I posted this.

By the way, you are doing what is called the Register/Deregister Dance (or R/DD…at least I call it that).

[...]Amazon: “Deregistering the Kindle will remove all content from the device” « I Love My Kindle[...]…

When people “buy a book” from the Kindle store, they are actually buying a license for the book. That license typically allows multiple simultaneous devices to have the book licensed for them at the same time (the default number is six), but they have to be on the same account.

That’s something that confuses some people: since you have to specify a device, they think the book belongs to the device. It doesn’t, fortunately, it belongs to the account.

Why is that fortunate?

If the license belonged to the device and that device was lost/stolen/failed, you’d no longer have access to the book. Instead, since it belongs to the account, if that happens you can simply download it to another device on the account at no additional charge.

It’s never really made sense to me that when a device was no longer on the account, you could still read the local copies…according to the way it is sold. However (and I realize you may not have seen the latest updated version of the post), the Amazon statement I quoted as the title of the post appears to be inaccurate: I deregistered a device, and the local copies stayed on it.

Buying a paperbook and buying an e-book license in the Kindle store are two very different things, and they each have their advantages. For me, the Kindle version is better. The big advantage of the paperbook purchase is that you own that copy of the book and can do whatever you want with the copy (not with the content, of course…you can’t adapt it into a movie or make and sell additional copies, typically). You can sell it, you can give it away, you can burn it. If something does happen to that copy, you are responsible for it….drop a paperback in a pool, and you can’t call the publisher to give you a free replacement.

I’ve never been a person to sell my books, or to give away ones I bought for myself to read (although I’ve bought many for other people). I have, though, had to replace books and had bought multiple copies for people in my family to have and read. With the Kindle store license, we have four people in two timezones reading the same book (even at the same time, if we want) for one purchase price…that works better for us.

So, a person buys a license in the Kindle store that is independent of a given device, and can be used to read the book on multiple devices.

They get many other things when they buy a Kindle store book, of course. The Kindle service includes free backup of the book, for example.

Yes, I do back up my Documents folder regularly, especially since I keep quite a few personal documents on it.

Once you put the books into Collections, your Collections are backed up for you by Amazon (well, after a sync). It’s nice to not have to create them again or put the books into them again. They could enhance the functionality, certainly.

Also trying to sort out books into collections so as to find them easier.

Not to hard to find a book in a few hundred, but it will pose more of a problem when people start searching a few thousand books. or even tens of thousands.

Good Reading,

Mark