This is not an anti-Kindle rant. I have purchased (rented?) several Kindle titles myself.
However, YSK that you are only licensing access to the book from Amazon, you don’t own it like a physical book.
There have been cases where Amazon deletes a title from all devices. (Ironically, one version of “1984” was one such title).
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html
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.
Here are the terms of use:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201014950
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.
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.
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.