A reader had a question about how storage for Kindle Books in the Amazon Cloud works:
Do I have to pay for the 552 books I have stored in Amazon’s Cloud. What type of storage do you recommend?
The price of storing your Kindle books in the cloud is included in the price you pay for your eBooks (there’s no storage fee for the free eBooks either.)
While you download copies of the eBooks to your Kindle or computer to read, there’s no reason to leave them on the device after you finish reading the book. Your original copy remains safe in Amazon’s cloud.
Removing a book from the device does not remove it from your Amazon cloud. The nice thing about that is that if you get a new device or your device is destroyed, you can easily log into your Amazon account and get to all of your books again. If you purchased a device other than a Kindle, just download the free Kindle app and log into your Amazon account. All of your books will be there.
This only applies to eBook purchases. (or free downloads that you add to your cart like a purchase). If you subscribe to the Kindle Unlimited service, books are only available for as long as you have the service or as long as the author officers them through Kindle Unlimited.
Moving those Kindle books to another storage device really wouldn’t do much good because they only work with Kindles or Kindle apps.
Now, you might ask, what if Amazon were to go out of business? Then you might have a problem. One would assume Amazon might unlock the digital rights management if that ever happened or transfer management of their products to another service. When Borders Books went out of business, they transferred the rights to their eBooks to Kobo.
But for now, Amazon appears to be going pretty strong.