This was unexpected. They lost me as a customer when they stopped allowing me to download books I bought and I'm in the Kobo (+ BookLore) side now and I am not coming back.

I wonder how many books are actually DRM-free and are going to be affected by this change. I suspect relatively few, but I would be happy to be wrong

But Kobo is bad too. Try refunding a book. Their website sent me in neverending circles and still I could not find a way to refund. Their stuff requires some specific reader or so. I don't quite remember the details, but I bought a book, thinking to avoid Amazon shit. Then I realized that their stuff sucks and I don't want to buy their blessed device or install special reader software. Also not DRM-free. So I wanted to refund, but couldn't. It is a very bad user experience. The only good experience you get from them is, if you go all in on their software/devices.

Since I couldn't refund, I had to pirate the book as epub/pdf from elsewhere. I decided to never again buy anything from Kobo.

For me it appears highly genre-correlated. High percentage of science fiction books come with a small statement "this book is drm free on request of publisher / author". Zero of my photography, music, computer science or graphic novels came with such a tag.

I bought a Kobo for the same reason but when it came to buying books, none of the books I wanted to buy were on Kobo's store.