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Microsoft Books The Almighty Buck Windows

Microsoft Stops Selling eBooks, Will Refund Customers For Previous Purchases (theverge.com) 131

Posted by BeauHD from the services-you-forgot-existed dept.
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 If your original payment method is no longer valid (or if you used a gift card), you'll receive a credit back to your Microsoft account to use online at the Microsoft Store.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.
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Microsoft Stops Selling eBooks, Will Refund Customers For Previous Purchases More

Microsoft Stops Selling eBooks, Will Refund Customers For Previous Purchases

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  • Books (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @05:25PM (#58374774) Journal
    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?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )

      So what's your problem with digital books that are in PDF?

      There's nothing wrong with digital books, as long as they in a format that you can take with you and put on whatever device is convenient.

      How will a remote company delete my pdfs when they don't control what devices they are installed on?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AHuxley ( 892839 )
        And yet the ebooks people expected to use are now gone.
        The problem is the ebook, the DRM, the OS.
        Who wants to risk an OS and brand that will remove digital content?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mark-t ( 151149 )
          I'm not making excuses for what Microsoft is doing here... I'm saying that digital books are not necessarily inherently bad in that respect because digital formats exist where neither the publisher nor the operating system provider has any control over what devices you might copy the content to.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by rtb61 ( 674572 )

            Quite correct the digital distribution method is generally fine. This is all down to a dick company, M$, that considers customers wallets and nothing more, to be emptied and abused, just don't give a shit, as long as they can legally get away with it. Consider this when buying anything from M$, you time, your investment, you as a person, a customer to be valued, not from them, a wallet to be lied to and emptied. You can bet they never advertised, we can cancel this order post purchase at any time and not gi

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by mark-t ( 151149 )

              You can bet they never advertised, we can cancel this order post purchase at any time and not give you your money back...

              Sure, except that MS *IS* refunding purchases

              It's probably still annoying as fuck for people that depended on the content, but at least they are getting their money back.

              • Re: (Score:3)

                by jwhyche ( 6192 )

                Sure, except that MS *IS* refunding purchases

                What about interest? Basically what is happening here is you have provided M$ with a interest free loan here. It is not what it was supposed to be, but it is essentially what happened here. I say if they are going to force a refund on a product, they need to provide the refund with far market interest rate.

                But more importantly, you should be able to say "no."

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                  I doubt Microsoft is getting refunded the royalties from the faux-sales of those books. The publishers aren't going to claw back years of royalties from authors and repay them to Microsoft just because Microsoft decided it wants out of the eBook business.

                • Re: (Score:3)

                  by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

                  Basically what is happening here is you have provided M$ with a interest free loan here. It is not what it was supposed to be, but it is essentially what happened here.

                  Not in the least. Microsoft held your money and in return you got access to the books that you would have otherwise purchased elsewhere. No one has suffered any harm here (except the people who made annotations, THAT really sucks).

                  • 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 cos

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by AHuxley ( 892839 )
              Re "Quite correct the digital distribution method is generally fine."
              Until the ebooks are gone in the real world .

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by tsa ( 15680 )

              Using M$ instead of MS is childish. Every company is there to make money.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by AHuxley ( 892839 )
            Recall the "Pulls Purchased E-Book Copies of 1984 and Animal Farm" in July 2009?
            https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
            That was the hint of what ebook control would be like.
            Now we see the reality of just what control the operating system provider has over ebooks in 2019 :)

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by mark-t ( 151149 )
              It seems to have escaped your attention that I was talking about using digital formats that nobody else controls what devices you install the books on, and nobody can decide you no longer have a right to read it.

        • Re:Books (Score:4, Informative)

          by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @07:56PM (#58375490)

          It's not just Microsoft, it's anyone who rents content to you. Had an interesting discussion with a friend a few months ago where he talked about all the content he'd bought from a well-known streaming service. I corrected him to tell him he'd rented it, not bought it. Even after multiple iterations of explanation, he still couldn't quite grasp that since it was held on someone else's servers and they could change their ToS any time they felt like it, all of his content was rented, not bought.

          Silly thing was he'd actually already been burned by this service when they decided to withdraw access to content he'd paid for. I've not got it via BT, which doesn't have these problems. Arguably it's OK since he's paid for it, he just had to go to an illegal pirate site to get the copy he legally paid for.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Blue23 ( 197186 )

            It's not just Microsoft, it's anyone who rents content to you. Had an interesting discussion with a friend a few months ago where he talked about all the content he'd bought from a well-known streaming service. I corrected him to tell him he'd rented it, not bought it. Even after multiple iterations of explanation, he still couldn't quite grasp that since it was held on someone else's servers and they could change their ToS any time they felt like it, all of his content was rented, not bought.

            Silly thing was he'd actually already been burned by this service when they decided to withdraw access to content he'd paid for.

            And I can't believe you're attempting to help the corporation brainwash your friend.

            That is exactly what the corporations want, because it (a) puts all the power in their hands and (b) exonerates them of wrongdoing and punitive penalties for stealing the content he purchased.

            YES, they can turn it off at any time. NO, that doesn't not mean that they have a unencumbered right do to so and can do so without penalty. It's corporate shills, intentional or otherwise, that convince people to give up their rights

      • PDF is a terrible format for ebooks. It constrains the formatting to a 'layout' that is size defined.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mark-t ( 151149 )
          That is the general idea... and depending on the types of content that one reads, that can be easily preferred.

      • I had a technical PDF that required getting certificates periodicly in order to read it. It was absurd that it had protection in the first place, but the added effort to request continued access was just extra abuse that was unnecessary. So print it out, delete the PDF, and continue.

        That said, Adobe is definitely putting this stuff into PDF.

    • HEY MICROSOFT (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      While you are cleaning up in there,
      please delete Windows 10 also and
      refund my Windows 7 Pro.
      Thanks a lot!

    • Anyone who is defending DRM needs to learn more about it. The whole purpose of DRM is to do stuff like this, it is not just copy protection. Even the so-called "good guys" like Valve can turn around to screw over their users this way.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )
        How does a watermark on a PDF allow a company to delete content that you've paid for when they don't control what devices you copy the PDF to?

    • You don't own anything in the digital world. Stop renting and look for real books nobody can remove.

      This isn't quite true. People just need to insist on ownership. We are guilty of allowing commercial interests to lull us with making it easy at the cost of ownership.

      Invest a little time, make an effort to learn a little, and exercise some self reliance. It is still possible to have all the benefits of digital books with very little of the drawbacks. Sure, it's great to hold, touch, and experience a real book. Some of my books will never be digital. But there is also something to be said to carrying

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by AHuxley ( 892839 )
        Re 'People just need to insist on ownership. "
        That worked out well when paying for ebooks :)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tsa ( 15680 )

        I highly recommend a Kobo reader in conjunction with Calibre [calibre-ebook.com] e-book manager. It's not difficult to buy books off, say, Amazon and pull them into Calibre. A plugin strips off the Digital Restrictions Management and I can easily convert it to e-pub and load it on my reader. I have access to the myriad of free books. Once it's in Calibre, no one can take it away from me. And I know if I decide to ditch my Kobo for some other hardware, that Calibre will likely support it. It's my future-proof e-book library. I can also move my library to my phone - while I don't like to do a /lot/ of reading on my phone, it is nice to have books there in case I go somewhere without my reader.

        I also do this, but with my Amazon Kindle. You can switch its wifi off or never enter a password to make sure Amazon doesn’t remove stuff from it.

      • This isn't quite true. People just need to insist on ownership. We are guilty of allowing commercial interests to lull us with making it easy at the cost of ownership.

        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

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Wulf2k ( 4703573 )

        Why would you expect DRM to have any significant overlap with cheat detection/prevention?

    • I download ebooks then remove DRM if present, fuck "renting". This is Slashdot so no one here has an excuse for not knowing how to use calibre.

  • PHRACK is pleased to announce our Corporate Library 2019 torrent. It's been two years since we first released this resource and the library has grown considerably (through hook and crook) since then. While the initial library containing everything from 1985 to 2017 was roughly 13GB uncompressed, the compressed version of the new library (1985-2019) weighs in at 78.4GB (under 100GB decompressed.)

    I say "compressed" because the library is now too large to create a torrent file from its unpacked directory and

    • Re:Phrack Corporate Library always DRM-free. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @04:09AM (#58376738) Homepage Journal

      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.

      • For the record, this isn't Phrack Magazine Issue #70. This is the corporate library, which is an archive Phrack maintains for its writing staff. Phrack (if you read issue #1) has always been a tripartite magazine covering Hacking, Phreaking and Anarchy. Unlike, say, 2600, Phrack is not solely a hacker magazine. Hence, we maintain an Anarchy archive, which includes, among other sections, a Conspiracy and Occult section. If you want a pure "hacking" torrent there are lots of them out there, but none of them a

  • You also find DRM free books in Apples iBooks store or on gutenberg.org or obooko.com etc.

    • iBooks requires a hardware dongle that I am not interested in.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AJWM ( 19027 )

      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 [calibre-ebook.com] is a pretty good program for both converting ebooks between formats and managing your collection.

  • Back in the old days... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BitterOak ( 537666 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @05:40PM (#58374860)
    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?

    • I have tons of content which doesn't have any DRM. I've never paid more than a few pence for any ebook which does have DRM. The DRM on all the ebooks I've paid anything for is supposedly trivial to break, but since none of it is important, I haven't bothered.

      On the other hand, if civilization falls and somehow doesn't set everything on fire, my various devices will eventually die due to battery failure of one kind or another, or some kind of wear.

      On the gripping hand, I don't have room for all the books I c

  • Newer != better (Score:3, Informative)

    by sursurrus ( 796632 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @05:41PM (#58374870)

    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.

    • Re: Newer != better (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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

    • Re:Newer != better (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gshegosh ( 1587463 ) on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @03:15AM (#58376642)

      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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cederic ( 9623 )

      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.

      I took 4000 books on holiday with me. None of them had DRM.

      Now admittedly I only read a dozen of them, but I had the choices. I'm too lazy to remove/reload the books I don't want to read right now.

      Seems to me the softheaded idiot is the one that thinks eReaders and Kindle require DRM. Consider yourself castigated.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pnutjam ( 523990 )
      As long as all my books rest in my calibre library, they are safe. No DRM and access from anywhere. I can pull up my library on any browser and it caches the book locally so I can read in an excellent e-reader web application.

      I usually just pull the copy to my phone and read it in my phone app, but it's nice to have options.

  • 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.)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

      If I buy a copy of War & Peace, I can copy it to my heart's content. Your statement is only true for works still under copyright.. There are thousands? of books/texts that are no longer encumbered by copyright.

    • lolz, right when the company recalls your rights your paper book vanishes... oh wait no it doesn't and you can even sell or give it to someone else.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AJWM ( 19027 )

      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 q

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Cederic ( 9623 )

        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.

        My guess is that that's legal for electronic books too. I mean, it is for software..

  • Authors (Score:4, Insightful)

    by vlad30 ( 44644 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @06:14PM (#58375058)
    Are they also taking the money back from authors ? or compensating them for lost sales as very few knew this existed.

    • Re:Authors (Score:4, Funny)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @07:07PM (#58375284)

      Are they also taking the money back from authors ? or compensating them for lost sales as very few knew this existed.

      I'm sure they are just going to write off the $3.50 paid out to the author from the one person who bought that one book on sale that one time. ever.

  • 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

  • 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 sic

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )

      Watermarking is a form of DRM.. but it doesn't turn the product into a rental.

      I have dozens of watermarked documents on my home computer and tablet. I can copy watermarked documents to any device I want... as often as I want, and the watermark doesn't interfere with usage... the only purpose that it serves is that if I were to distribute a watermarked document, it could be traced to my purchase, and I might be held accountable for that.

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

      You can convert them with Calibre to any other supported format. The same applies to many other rare/dying formats.

  • 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.

  • "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

    • This is so true. Companies want you to think if they say one thing in big print where you're sure to see it, and something else in tiny print somewhere you'll never see it, the tiny print cancels out the big print. It doesn't. If they give you a "Buy" button and you click it to buy something, that means you bought it. Not rented. Bought.

      What Microsoft is doing is just stealing, plain and simple. If I sell you something, I can't come back years later and say, "Hey, I've changed my mind about selling yo

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