Disappearing Ebooks, Part 2

My experience with my Nook resetting reminded me of this story about a Norwegian woman who had her ebooks taken away by Amazon. Now, there was a happy ending when the story went public and Amazon realized their error. This was an extreme case and nothing like my situation, which was just a device problem that was resolved extremely well (more on this later). 

Nygaard's story brought something to light: when we buy ebooks from a retailer like Amazon, we are really borrowing the files, and they reserve the right to remove them from our devices. Back in 2009 there was this story about Amazon pulling Animal Farm and 1984  from customers' devices (I can't help but chuckle at the irony of their book selection here). That turned out to be because of a vendor selling (or should I say licensing?) the ebooks without the rights, and the customers' accounts were refunded, but I imagine it was still a shock to people who thought they had purchased and owned those files.

We all agree to the terms of service when setting up our devices. We do need to realize that those terms of service involve the provider pulling the content in the event of a digital rights issue.

As for my story, all is well. I took my Nook in to a BN to see if anyone there could help and they were nice enough to swap it out with a 16 gig, factory refurbished Nook Tablet. I still had to download all of my ebooks and apps all over again, but since they're backed up in my BN account I didn't have to pay a dime and now I have an upgraded device.

I had been thinking about buying a Google Nexus 7 if I had to replace my Nook, but BN won me back with their customer service. Thank you Dan from the Prudential Mall Barnes & Noble! 

My problem was just an issue with a device, and of course I had all of my purchases backed up through BN. It's convenient to be able to put all of your ebooks on one device but remember to make sure they're synched with the retailer in case you lose your reader. Also remember that most retailers have ebook apps for cell phones and computers as well. 

Have you had a situation where your ebooks disappeared? Or have you had to replace them after losing a device?