Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Stops Selling eBooks, Will Refund Customers For Previous Purchases (theverge.com)
Starting today, Microsoft is ending all ebook sales in its Microsoft Store for Windows PCs. "Previously purchased ebooks will be removed from users' libraries in early July," reports The Verge. "Even free ones will be deleted. The company will offer full refunds to users for any books they've purchased or preordered." From the report: Microsoft's "official reason," according to ZDNet, is that this move is part of a strategy to help streamline the focus of the Microsoft Store. It seems that the company no longer has an interest in trying to compete with Amazon, Apple Books, and Google Play Books. It's a bit hard to imagine why anyone would go with Microsoft over those options anyway.
If you have purchased ebooks from Microsoft, you can continue accessing them through the Edge browser until everything vanishes in July. After that, customers can expect to automatically receive a refund. According to a newly published Microsoft Store FAQ, "refund processing for eligible customers start rolling out automatically in early July 2019 to your original payment method." If your original payment method is no longer valid (or if you used a gift card), you'll receive a credit back to your Microsoft account to use online at the Microsoft Store. Microsoft will also offer an additional $25 credit (to your Microsoft account) if you annotated or marked up any ebook that you purchased from the Microsoft Store prior to today, April 2nd. Liliputing reminds us that "if you pay for eBooks, music, movies, video games, or any other content from a store that uses DRM, then you aren't really buying those digital items so much as paying a license fee for the rights to access them... a right that can be revoked if the company decides to remove a title from your device unexpectedly or if a company shuts down a server that would normally handle the digital rights management features."
You can find DRM-free eBooks at some online stores including Smashwords and Kobo (by browsing the DRM-free selection), or from publisher websites including Angry Robot, and Baen.
If you have purchased ebooks from Microsoft, you can continue accessing them through the Edge browser until everything vanishes in July. After that, customers can expect to automatically receive a refund. According to a newly published Microsoft Store FAQ, "refund processing for eligible customers start rolling out automatically in early July 2019 to your original payment method." If your original payment method is no longer valid (or if you used a gift card), you'll receive a credit back to your Microsoft account to use online at the Microsoft Store. Microsoft will also offer an additional $25 credit (to your Microsoft account) if you annotated or marked up any ebook that you purchased from the Microsoft Store prior to today, April 2nd. Liliputing reminds us that "if you pay for eBooks, music, movies, video games, or any other content from a store that uses DRM, then you aren't really buying those digital items so much as paying a license fee for the rights to access them... a right that can be revoked if the company decides to remove a title from your device unexpectedly or if a company shuts down a server that would normally handle the digital rights management features."
You can find DRM-free eBooks at some online stores including Smashwords and Kobo (by browsing the DRM-free selection), or from publisher websites including Angry Robot, and Baen.
Curated by Clippy.
Users, feel free to convert all your ebooks now.
You can find DRM free ebooks at many locations.
You don't own anything in the digital world.
Stop renting and look for real books nobody can remove.
Invest in real paper books and enjoy reading.
Music next?
Games next?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I say "compressed" because the library is now too large to create a torrent file from its unpacked directory and file structure. For that reason, this edition of the library is being released as a compressed archive (regular .rar format, not a renamed .ace file ;P)
What's new?
@ Many more hacking and programming e-books in most categories.
@ Tons of new .MIL instruction manuals from the USA D0D, and added CANADA ARMED FORCES manuals for the first time as well.
@ O'Reilly cookbooks for most popular platforms.
@ Charles Preston Black History Month Archive. Charles had to take this important archive off Google Drive in February because of DRM bullshit. We replicate it here for posterity. It’s in the /anarchy/survival section.
@ That insane 2000-page Q-anon PDF, and a PDF of the Captain Crunch autobiography.
@ Complete DEFCON and Black Hat conference rips: every year, every presentation PDF, all the code, and audio from almost every presentation, all in one place for easy search or AI training. Also CCC magazine in German.
@ The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes (2016.) This German film has been banned in the west and is desperately important watching for anyone who wants to understand the current state of the world and why we are in a new, artificial cold war.
@ An entirely new Russian section, with programming and hacking books in Russian, as well as many and various documents relating to Russian hacking and meme warfare.
@ LinkedIn ICE archives: Scraped list of all ICE profiles from LinkedIn, for future war crimes prosecution.
@ The Beto O'Rourk cDc .txt archive: Everything Psychedelic Warlord published via cDc.
@ NZ shooter video, manifesto, social media scrapes and related content. This material is all in the /occult/kek section, in an additional .rar shell so nobody access it by accident. It's also prefaced by the excellent four-part series "The Kek Wars," ( https://www.ecosophia.net/the-... ) which provides important historical context for any future researcher using our archive to study government occlusion of information in the Trump era.
The full file list is available at: https://drive.google.com/open?...
Magnet link for the entire library:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:4cd4c3031bfc7abc3f8efb7348884b4d2c155d00&dn=Phrack+Corporate+Library+2019
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
Overpriced and misleading kindle wannabe. Kind of shit you would expect from a Walmart partner.
You cannot trust Microsoft for media licensing (books/music/video/etc) they do this every time. What a joke. There should be laws that require companies to setup a minimum requirement to provide continued support for digital purchases - much like they regulate banks to ensure they don't fail.
You also find DRM free books in Apples iBooks store or on gutenberg.org or obooko.com etc.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Back in the old days, when a bookstore closed, it meant you couldn't buy any more books there. But nothing happened to the books you already bought. Now when a bookstore closes, all your books disappear in a puff of smoke. Isn't progress wonderful?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Giant evil corporations hate simple traditional things that work well for cheap or free.
Water is a good example. Companies spend billions trying to convince you that it's boring, even publishing junk science about "overhydration" and how juice, tea, gatorade, etc all 'count' towards the 8 glasses of water a day target. Now that we basically view Soda as poison marketed to children they've pushed back with flavored zero calorie water that is nowhere as healthy as the real thing.
I thought Kindle and its clones were the height of folly when they came out, and my opinon hasn't changed. Books are durable, tangible, random-access, and have worked well for humanity since the invention of the printing press. A fucking evil corporation looks at books and identifies the key problem: they persist long after the original purchase. A book can sit on a shelf for 20 years until someone else picks it up.
Enter the DRM - ereader model. You now 'license' the right to use the book - tying yourself both to the DRM and the platform. When you die, or more likely the device breaks, the book is gone. It cannot be given to a friend, passed down to children, donated to a library or traded via a book swap. That contributes to scarcity, under classical economics, and drives up the price and profit. This is total bullshit - but what's worse is the army of softheaded media brainwashed idiots out there suggesting that paper is somehow 'archaic' and that there are 'benefits' to ereaders. Fuck that noise!
Now we see the end result of that folly. Your entire Microshit library can be erased at the touch of a button. THEY, not you, control the terms of the refund. Why shouldn't they pay you in cash instead of forcing you to take some kind of chickenshit microsoft store credit? Did you not in fact pay in real money? And I marvel at the decision that all the notes and markings you may have taken in your entire library are worth the grand sum of $25! They, not you, decided that. They wrote the terms of the licensing agreement, forcing binding arbitration and preventing a class action lawsuit (my best guess but fitting the overwhelming pattern of large evil corporations).
It's time for people to wake up. It's time for shiny new products that we don't actually need to die on day 1. It's time to realize that anyone talking about the advantages of eReaders and Kindle is 100% a softheaded idiot who should be loudly and publicly castigated.
Even when you buy physical books, due to the nature of copyright laws in basically every country that has them, you aren't really buying those physical items so much as paying a license fee for the rights to access the data encoded on them.
There are some extremely far-reaching consequences of this that most people fail to realize or think don't apply because of some matter of physicality (which doesn't matter one iota in the eyes of the law.)
America- the only industrialised nation to have a population evil enough to accept widespread use of slavery- sometimes allowed slave 'marriage'- 'cept when Microsoft, I mean 'master' wanted to sell off the slaves, the 'marriage' became null and void.
A 'freeman' can own a thing. A slave can never own anything- his/her master really have all ownership rights. And when those 'married' slaves were split up and sold on to different new masters, sometimes they received 'compensation' just as Microsoft is offering to the sheeple that never owned their ebooks.
Yet no new law removed the FIRST SALE doctrine that ensured your records, books, tapes etc were yours to keep FOREVER. This new slave doctrine re:media from the new tech corporations has been introduced under the covers- propagandised by foul outlets like slashdot.
Licensed goods always existed- but the definition was a service you paid for that represented a fixed duration and maybe support. Ebooks are NOT a service- not 'licensed' under any concept of sale recognised by law. They are taken away from the slaves that held them because the corporations can. And legal remedies are missing since the current law-makers are in the pockets of the owners of the tech giants.
Anyone who pays for media that can be removed at any moment by 'master' is an idiot that deserves everything they get.
While you are cleaning up in there,
please delete Windows 10 also and
refund my Windows 7 Pro.
Thanks a lot!
Sounds like PlaysForSure all over again. Don't trust DRM ever!
I don't have any ebooks from Microsoft, but I don't see why they think they can just revert a sale. Can the buyer decide after months or years to give a book back for a full refund? No? Then neither can Microsoft.
Are they also taking the money back from authors ? or compensating them for lost sales as very few knew this existed.
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
My problem was Edge.
Seriously, they required you to sign into your account that you purchased the books with, which contained your credit card information. And what are the odds that it was also your email address for that account as well? And what did they have you sign into? The web browser itself! Not just a web page, but THE web browser. Later, the operating system itself making the web browser always logged in! I didn't even bother trying to setup a second Microsoft account, given the local account wouldn't work, I seriously doubted a second Microsoft Azure AD for Home users would have fared any better.
GOOD RIDDANCE!
Contrary to popular opinion, it's not "free" to download a "free" book. These sorry punters probably had to wade around in a Microsoft-designed web site, filtering the chaff from the dross. (Bargain tables generally only contain chaff and dross, but sometimes hours of hard prospecting pays off with a big score, that almost feels too good to be true.)
On my Kobo, I even have a few books which I marked up with local annotations (though none with DRM). Poof goes your own work if you were suckered into that, too.
A typical Microsoft half-effort toward making their discarded customers whole.
An E-Book does not wear like a physical one if I read it, or leave it in full sunlight on a shelf.
Therefore, it does not lose value. Maybe I haven't even looked at it yet, for lack of time - I would guess that even 5..10% of the physical books on my shelf are yet unread.
However, the price of a typical E-Book is subject to normal Inflation, since Editors and Authors cost of living rises with inflation.
Therefore, even if I get a refund, I lose the accrued inflation between the date of purchase and the date of the refund.
As a minimum, Microsoft should be required to refund the additional compunded inflation rate!
Even electronic books burn pretty well. Never mind fiction, it's coming to the point where even historical and technical books can be swept away at any time.
What we really need is a new law that declares all digital products with DRM as rentals. No more of this "you can use it until you can't" nonsense. If the company wants to sell something as a lease/rental, they have to guarantee the minimum amount of time you're allowed to use it. How long a rental lasts factors into how much it's worth, and I'm sick of being told to buy stuff that costs $50 but could disappear either 5 years from now or tomorrow. It's clearly obvious that a company doesn't have to go out of business for licenses to expire, and they don't even bother to specify the support period. This needs to stop.
Unsurprisingly, much of the Windows7 documentation and help files have been deleted from Microsoft's site, and replaced with ads for Windows10. The future looks pretty bleak for anyone who needs to support legacy systems, even assuming the software itself can still work without activation.
Amazon ate Microsoft's lunch before the bag was even placed in it's backpack.
It was a somewhat valiant effort, but it's hard to go up against a company that sells sub $100 Android tablets focused on eBooks.
I guess I can't read my *.LIT e-books anymore.
Wait, I haven't been able to read them since they discontinued Microsoft Reader in 2012. All those e-books I used on my WinCE and Pocket PCs, and later on my Windows PC are now unreadable.
Wait, I didn't notice.
Kriston
Microsoft is almost dead.
Sooner than I thought.
In 2029, expect Amazon to do the same and erase all popular fiction ebooks published 2000 - 2010 due to some large licensing issue with the publishers.
Amazon will have a business incentive to remove tens of thousands of listings for e-books which it sells 1 or 2 copies every year.
Not just a MS with a tiny fraction of the number of users, but tens of millions of users with hundreds of millions of purchased *rented* books.
I've never used a MS E-Book. Can you print them? If so, I'd use a print-to-pdf utility to back the e-books up.
There ought to be some workaround to prevent MS from remotely deleting material that you have them already downloaded. I don't know the mechanism they are using for DRM (never used the Microsoft books thing), but most DRMs have a workaround of one kind or another.
(I'm not even sure how this is even legal, but I guess if you're as big as Microsoft, you do what you want and pay lawyers to make it legal. Did the original "purchase" have small print saying "warning! You're not actually buying this product, you're just buying the rights to read it as long as we choose to make it available."?)
https://www.ghacks.net/2019/04/02/microsoft-is-shutting-down-books-in-microsoft-store/
https://www.engadget.com/2019/04/02/microsoft-store-removes-e-books/
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
No one has suffered any harm here (except the people who made annotations, THAT really sucks).
NO.
If it took zero time and zero effort to find a book, purchase it, and load it on your machine, that might be true.
But, no. For nobody to "suffer any harm", they would need to replace the books on your machine with a copy that you can read that is downloaded from some different service.
If they're making you do the work of finding a copy somwhere else and buying it, that is free labor that they are not paying for. You already did that labor once, now they are telling you to do it again.
but your time costs microsoft nothing.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
"if you pay for eBooks, music, movies, video games, or any other content from a store that uses DRM, then you aren't really buying those digital items so much as paying a license fee for the rights to access them... a right that can be revoked if the company decides to remove a title from your device unexpectedly or if a company shuts down a server that would normally handle the digital rights management features."
That is bullcrap that the companies do their best to get you to accept.
If you wish to license me something, list it as "License this eBook". If you list it as "Buy this eBook", then I will push that the action taken on my part was a purchase, which should supersede any terms and conditions because there is a clear and common use definition of the word "buy" in a retail transaction which they are in breach of.
If I do markup in a book, then in addition there is theft of some sort going on if a company pulls the license.
Do not accept companies redefining these things to put all of the power in their hands.
LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? C. MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process.
There are plenty of gratis programs that implement limitations which work against the user over which the user has no control. There used to be a small program for detecting the "click of death" which was said to signal an imminent failure in an Iomega Zip drive (which were once much more popular). The program was written in assembly by a self-described security researcher and the user was allowed to download and run only the compiled executable for Windows but the program cost no money. That program had code in it that checked the date and would not run the program's main function if the program ran after a certain date. Had that program been free software (software the user is free to run, inspect, share, and modify) one could still make use of its routines today across operating systems. This might still be handy to people trying to retrieve data from Zip disks, for example. But the program was proprietary and carried a proprietary dependency (ran only on a proprietary OS).
So this teaches us that DRM (digital restrictions management) is a direct outcome of the power of a proprietor. The commercial factors are side issues; if we had free software to read the books, play the media, and do other things we could use them instead of the proprietary software each DRM implementation depends on and we could let commercial organizations sell us copies of free software and provide support and improved code at a fee. I'd happily pay for commercial support for free software I sometimes need fixed or improved. The real enemy is software non-freedom. And we need to speak out against those who claim that strongly copylefted free software will kill people (as automobile manufacturers have told people).
Digital Citizen
Though the lesson will probably be ignored, this is a good example why “cloud” based services, except for certain specific use cases, are generally a bad idea. I have some academic reference materials in digital format from the turn of the century that run just fine despite the fact that the company that produced them is now defunct because they are completely run and stored on my local machine.