Microsoft has a DRM-locked ebook store that isn’t making enough money,
so they’re shutting it down and taking away every book that every one of
its customers acquired effective July 1.
Customers will receive refunds.
This puts the difference between DRM-locked media and unencumbered media
into sharp contrast. 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. Likewise, I have bought many books from
long-defunct booksellers and even defunct publishers, but I still own
those books.
When I was a bookseller, nothing I could do would result in your losing
the book that I sold you. If 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.
People sometimes treat me like my decision not to sell my books through
Amazon’s Audible is irrational (Audible will not let writers or
publisher opt to sell their books without DRM), but if you think Amazon
is immune to this kind of shenanigans, you are sadly mistaken. My books
matter a lot to me. I just paid $8,000 to have a container full of books
shipped from a storage locker in the UK to our home in LA so I can be
closer to them. The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some
kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I
can imagine: if the publishing industry deliberately set out to destroy
any sense of intrinsic, civilization-supporting value in literary
works, they could not have done a better job.
If you’ve got an ereader and want to actually own your books, I heartily recommend using cailbre to scrape the DRM off and so you can backup the files.
Seconding calibre as a brilliant tool for ebook management in general.
calibre is good
and it’s free and open source software!
Cailbre helped me properly access ebooks my dad bought for me ages ago whose encryption keys had been outmoded and were no longer available for my new laptop’s os! Nearly 15 of the books he’d given me I hadn’t even had a chance to read before then, but the free copy of cailbre I got online had all of the old, outdated encryption program keys!!
