The Kindle brouhaha

I was literally hours from pulling the trigger on a Kindle purchase. At $299 it’s just about the right price. I’d prefer it better if it were around $250, but $299 is OK.
But I’m holding off now, based on Amazon’s decision to remove books (albeit copies that violated copyright, but had been bought and paid for — and with the understanding that Amazon also refunded purchasers’ money) from unsuspecting users’ machines without any notice.
Now in the vast majority of cases this would never come up. But there needs to be a change in the e-book purchase paradigm before I will be likely to buy a Kindle — a change from “you’re just licensing a copy and we can revoke that license whenever we want”, to “you bought it, you own it.”
E-books need to be treated just like physical books. If the price is reasonable, people won’t bother pirating them. The problem is that most publishers don’t want to see their $29.99 hardback best-sellers going for a couple of bucks in electronic format. But then, most publishers don’t get that the person who would be willing to spend a couple of bucks — maybe even three — for an e-book isn’t very likely to spend $29.99 on the hardback — and may not pay $7.99 for the paperback, either.
A sale is a sale. I love books, but I’m to the point where I don’t have any room for any more. Electronic publishing is the future for me…and it would be nice if publishers would get it through their heads that I want to OWN the book, not merely license it and rely on their good will to allow me to keep a copy forever.
And Amazon needs to fix this problem or the Kindle is going to be out of business.