12/28/2022 0 Comments Microsoft audio booksIf I regretted selling you a book, I didn't get to break into your house and steal it, even if I left you a cash refund for the price you paid. When I was a bookseller, nothing I could do would result in your losing the book that I sold you. Likewise, I have bought many books from long-defunct booksellers and even defunct publishers, but I still own those books. ![]() ![]() I have bought a lot of MP3s over the years, thousands of them, and many of the retailers I purchased from are long gone, but I still have the MP3s. This puts the difference between DRM-locked media and unencumbered media into sharp contrast. I keep saying it and it sounds worse each time.Īs Cory Doctorow points out in discussing all of this, he has been predicting this kind of nonsense for years now - including in a 2004 speech delivered at Microsoft. Reminded that the Microsoft ebook store closes next week. This tweet kind of sums up the insanity here: But that provides only the coldest comfort. Microsoft will refund customers in full for what they paid, plus an extra $25 if they made annotations or markups. And because of digital rights management-the mechanism by which platforms retain control over the digital goods they sell-you have no recourse. The year before that, Walmart shut down its own ill-fated MP3 store, at first suggesting customers burn their purchases onto CDs to salvage them before offering a download solution. Amazon, overcome by a fit of irony in 2009, memorably vanished copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from Kindles. Other companies have pulled a similar trick in smaller doses. And starting as soon as this week, it’s going to remove all purchased books from the libraries of those who bought them. As of April 2, it halted all ebook sales. Relegated to Microsoft’s Edge browser, the digital bookstore never took off. The company had made its foray into ebooks in 2017, as part of a Windows 10 Creators Update that sought to round out the software available to its Surface line. Microsoft made the announcement in April that it would shutter the Microsoft Store’s books section for good. The latest in our forever ongoing series, recognizing in the digital age how you often no longer own what you've bought, thanks to DRM and copyright: this week, people with Microsoft ebooks will discover they're dead.
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