Anyone who bought ebooks through the Microsoft Store is in for a rude jolt in the coming days . The good news ? you’re able to get a repayment . The bad news ? All of your books are going to be deletedthis month .
Microsoft announce in April that it would stop sell ebooks and that any Book the company already sell would halt working in former July because the DRM server were being close off . Yes , you read that aright . Those books that you “ buy ” are going to vanish . Even the “ free ” books that you downloaded through Microsoft will be delete .
Microsoft take up selling ebooks back in 2017 but technical school limit made them unpopular with users . As my colleague Alex Cranz explain back inApril , anyone who bought Microsoft ’s ebooks had to use Microsoft ’s Edge browser app and the company never made a dedicated ebook reader lotion . The books also came with restrictive DRM , the digital locks on media that proscribe people from sharing the files with others . Unfortunately , the universe of those same lock are the precise reason that Microsoft can pull the plug on your ledger remotely .
Photo: (Gizmodo/Alex Cranz)
Users will automatically get refunded to whatever account they have on data file , but if your credit card has kick the bucket or you do n’t have a payment method acting stack away with the companionship , Microsoft will give you a credit that can be used online in the Microsoft Store .
What happens if you made annotations or Federal Reserve note in your ebooks ? Those are going to vanish too . But Microsoft is sacrifice $ 25 to anyone who made annotations in their books prior to April 2 . How generous , right ?
This entire debacle picture just how nonsensical our current medium landscape painting can be when we ’re all purchasing movies , games , and Christian Bible through fellowship using DRM . Few people anticipate the Apple Store to go away anytime soon , but what bechance 10 or 20 years from now when a competitor comes along and Apple decide that it ’s too expensive to defend its own servers ? Back in the days of DVD , no one could take your movies away from you . Now all it takes is the flick of a switching on many platforms , as we can see quite clearly with Microsoft ’s latest clusterfuck . As Cory Doctorow explains over atBoing Boing , he predicted this accurate scenario when he gave a talk at Microsoft15 eld ago .
Microsoft did not now respond to Gizmodo ’s inquiry about when the technical school giant would be pluck the cud exactly . All we know for certain is that it ’s supposed to happen this month .
Read ‘ em while you start ‘ em , I judge .
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