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.
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's the same with Google Books. you can't copy text from the book you bought into your notes. you're not allowed to copy text. i want to buy books legitimately for my research, but i cant use any of this shit.
What do you mean? Bookmarks with no labels and highlights with no indexing isn't enough for you? What do you want, integration of open source note taking software with Google Books?!? That's ridiculous, nobody would ever use that...
Okay but for real. I got through college using One Note's snip tool to take pictures of the text and paste it into my digital notes. So that's a way to do it. It does suck that we have all this tech but we won't let it talk to each other because rich people have to get richer, even around academia.
It does suck that we have all this tech but we won't let it talk to each other because rich people have to get richer
This is my biggest personal disillusionment and frustration with the world. If companies would commit to open interoperable data standards and allowing access through APIs, there's so many things in life that would be better. We could have our tech actually work for us.