What I hate about electronic books is that publishers want to move away from selling me their books and move towards renting them.
If I take too long to read them, they could disappear and I would either have to renew my rental or forgo finishing the book.
After you buy download them (a book) to your Kindle can’t you load on to a thumb drive or your computer?
It sounds like they're just now figuring out that the "cloud" is not the deep-space vacuum they hoped it would be.
If they have to keep track of everybody's purhcase licenses for books for all time, that cloud is going to evaporate very quickly.
They're probably hoping that this "rental" concept will be accepted by the marketplace, and then they won't have to keep people's ownership records forever, just to let them access the "books" whenever they want.
-PJ