I recently had that problem on my ipad, my books were gone. I looked in my little ipad book and it said when you lose an app, that sometimes it helps to shut it completely off, then turn it on again...and it worked! I usually don't turn my ipad off, just goes in "sleep" mode I guess. It may work for you too. The ibook app. showed in the ipad but when I tapped it, there wasn't any books there.

I have read a lot of free or really cheap books, mostly from Amazon or Book Bub. Among my favorites: Fiction Tell No Lies by Julie Compton Torch Ginger by Toby Neal Directed Verdict by Randy Singer ( a Christian novel) Face the Winter Naked by Bonnie Turner Hostile Witness by Rebecca Forster Authors almost anything by Aaron Stander Non Fiction The Long Steep Path by Catherine Ryan, who wrote Pay it Forward The Accidental Farmer by Tim Young

mudlady- You're sort of comparing apples to oranges. A Kindle Fire OS is much simpler and more limited in function than a PC's OS. You should simply buy the newest Kindle Fire and not worry. I suspect the device will fail physically before you have to worry about the OS being a problem. Amazon wants the Kindle Fire to work well for years to come: they don't want to alienate their ebook-buying customer base by introducing incompatibilities with new models. Finally, in all fairness to Microsoft, their ending of support for XP was no secret. They did maintain it for 12 years and warned people years before about the fact that support would be ending, and they even had three successor systems in release before they did end XP support. I have an old tablet that came with the latest OS available at the time -- XP -- and it's still functional. Just because support ended for that OS doesn't mean the software quits working. The best strategy is to buy current technology with the most current OS and use it. You may want something new in 10 years, but I don't think there is cause for alarm that an HDX 7 will suddenly turn into a lemon.

Warning about iPads. You can't repair them. My kids are required to have them for school. My dd's stopped charging six months ago, after 18 months of moderate use. I had Apple as well as an indendent computer repair, look at it and they seemed to think that something just inside the iPad, where you plug in the charger was out of kilter. Too bad, so sad, they told me. Apple fixes phones, laptops, etc, but not iPads. Then two weeks ago, my son's iPad, fully charged, would flash on for a second, then off. I took it to Apple. He fooled with it, was able to get it turned on, but the display was out of whack, totally pixilated. Basically, no good as the screen was all fuzzy. His was also about 18 months old.. Had to replace his as well. i have the original iPad, from when it first came out. Still works fine, but because it's so old, it can't be updated, and newer apps will not work on it. We still use it for movies and such. I replaced it a while ago with an ipad2. So while I haven't had any issues with mine, I did have to replace two that were newer than mine this year and totally frustrated, especially the one where it just stopped charging. Seemed like that was something that could be easily fixed by replacing a part. I love the functionality and compatibility of all my Apple products, but at the price for an IPad, very irritatated two of them crapped out so quickly.