#'s59-66 discontinued

[MacGyver]

Why would an ebook ever go out of print? It seems like Simon & Schuster could indefinitely offer them for download through their site, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, etc.

[Lungbarrow]

Yes, it's an odd thing for an ebook to go out of print but I assume it's a rights issue. If Penguin (who own the Grosset & Dunlap brand) don't have the rights to publish them any longer, we'll have to wait until Simon & Schuster have prepared them for publication. It's even possible that Penguin have removed them from sale before the rights period expired and S&S still can't legitimately sell them.
I suspect you'd still be able to read the books if you'd bought them before they went out of print but whether you'd be able to redownload them after that is questionable. Amazon have, in the past, remotely deleted books from purchasers Kindles without permission or warning as a result of publishers violating copyright - just one of the reasons I've got a Kobo!

[MacGyver]

suspect you'd still be able to read the books if you'd bought them before they went out of print but whether you'd be able to redownload them after that is questionable. Amazon have, in the past, remotely deleted books from purchasers Kindles without permission or warning as a result of publishers violating copyright - just one of the reasons I've got a Kobo!

The fact that that is even possible discourages me from using ebooks. I understand if publishers are violating copyright, then something must be done because that is not right. But Amazon also needs to explain that well to their consumers beforehand so that they understand why their purchased books are being deleted.
   I don't have anything against ebooks- some people enjoy using them and that's cool. I don't generally happen to be one of them. (Though technically I was using ebooks before ebook readers were even around- back in the late '90s, I remember looking up Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories online (which are all in the public domain of course) and reading them on the computer- but most of them, I wound up just printing out and then reading.