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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 If your original payment method is no longer valid (or if you used a gift card), you'll receive a credit back to your Microsoft account to use online at the Microsoft Store.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"
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.
While you are cleaning up in there,
please delete Windows 10 also and
refund my Windows 7 Pro.
Thanks a lot!
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
Yep. A lot of Amazon Kindle content is DRM-free also, but not all. My books are all DRM-free, but there's no obvious flag in the sales page details (you have to interpret what it means by unlimited devices, lending enabled, etc).
Calibre is a pretty good program for both converting ebooks between formats and managing your collection.
-- Alastair
Not really. First Sale Doctrine applies. If I buy a physical copy of a book, I can give or sell it to somebody else, but then I won't have it any more. It's even legal to "edit" the book by marking it up or cutting and pasting and then to sell that modified physical copy.
Some textbook publishers have gone to some great lengths to get around this, everything from trying to ban the import of used copies from other countries, to publishing new "editions" with almost nothing changed but the end-of-chapter questions or links to a website they can make obsolete annually.
-- Alastair
Yeah, you can also find DRM-free books at Amazon. Look for "Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited" in the ebook details. It's up to the publisher whether to enable DRM or not on a per book basis on Amazon. Even with it on, book pirates have it stripped off within minutes of publication, so more and more publishers are choosing to disable it.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Because the file list is literally too long to make a torrent from it. It exceeds the limits of the tech.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
Kinda sad that the once great PHRACK has fallen to the level of conspiracy theory bullshit. There's some good stuff in there but go they really need to make one giant 76GB torrent with all the conspiracy stuff mixed in?
Also security focused zine using RAR, LOL.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yeah, I published DRM free on Amazon (and others). I doubt it made any difference to sales either.