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Slashdot: Microsoft Store's eBooks Will Soon 'Stop Working' When It Closes Their DRM Server

Microsoft Store's eBooks Will Soon 'Stop Working' When It Closes Their DRM Server
Published on June 30, 2019 at 09:04AM
Cory Doctorow writes at BoingBoing: "The books will stop working": That's the substance of the reminder that Microsoft sent to customers for their ebook store, reminding them that, as announced in April, the company is getting out of the ebook business because it wasn't profitable enough for them, and when they do, they're going to shut off their DRM servers, which will make the books stop working. Almost exactly fifteen years ago, I gave an influential, widely cited talk at Microsoft Research where I predicted this exact outcome. I don't feel good about the fact that I got it right. This is a fucking travesty. We're just days away from the "early July" shutdown. And Doctorow elaborated on his feelings in a blog post in April: This puts the difference between DRM-locked media and unencumbered media into sharp contrast... 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.

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