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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 If your original payment method is no longer valid (or if you used a gift card), you'll receive a credit back to your Microsoft account to use online at the Microsoft Store.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.
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.
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?
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
You are confused. Kindles, or digital epaper readers in general, are wonderful. I have a few kindles. I load them with different things, like the data pads from STNG. One has tech stuff, another programming, both have a bunch if novels and my main 32GB one all of the above and a bunch of other stuff.
One kindle lets me carry, what, the equivalent of 32,000 novels? What's wrong with that?
Your complaints about DRM are another thing. Most of my books were purchased in physical form. Take a paper stack cutter and chop off the spine of a paperback, then feed the sheets to an adf scanner and Presto ChangeO you have a text searchable pdf. I've got a thousand SciFi/ fantasy pulp novels from library and ebay bulk sales that aren't available for sale as ebooks.
Takes about five minutes for a 300 page novel on a decent adf home office scanner. Great busy work for interns at this point, but you can two or more of them at the same time if you are going to do it all day. I knew I was moving a year before I did, so I fed the automatic document feeder while ripping my movie collection. Seven minutes to rip a DVD, five for a light novel, fifteen for a high res photo mag with text ocr. Multitasked it while watching tv.
So yeah, drm, boo. Strip it with calibre. EBooks are often over priced. But readers? May as well bitch about lamps that let people read at night.
Well, thanks for calling me a softheaded idiot, but I'll reply anyway.
While I do agree with your criticism of DRM, I personally much prefer using e-reader than paper books. There are a lot of advantages such as possibility to have thousands of books with me all the time or searching them. Even some "corporate" features are convenient such as possibility to sync notes, bookmarks and current reading position between different devices.
Having said that, I do not trust Amazon or anyone and am afraid of them doing exactly what Microsoft is doing. This is why I try to buy e-books that are DRM-free and those that aren't - I break the DRM and store unprotected files on my infrastructure. There is nothing wrong with moving from paper to electronic books. There are things wrong with business models for electronic books and DRM. We should focus our criticism in my opinion and not throw away all the new toys.