At least with the Kindle, I can turn off the 3G wireless, not to mention back up my ebooks on and external hard drive, and restore them to my Kindle if they disappear mysteriously. On the other hand, "when you keep your ebooks in the cloud, there is no need for clumsy, time consuming backup - they are ALWAYS there". Unless of course, we decide to make them go away or change them. With safeguards like that (avoiding their cloud), I don't HAVE to trust Amazon.com.