Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20297331

Summarizes https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4497396/books-in-mi...

The books category is closing

Starting April 2, 2019, the books category in Microsoft Store will be closing. Unfortunately, this means that starting July 2019 your ebooks will no longer be available to read, but you'll get a full refund for all book purchases. See below for details.

While you can no longer purchase or acquire additional books from the Microsoft Store, you can continue to read your books until July 2019 when refunds will be processed. Will I be able to buy, rent or pre-order books after April 2, 2019?

No. On April 2, 2019, you can no longer buy, rent or pre-order books. You can continue to use Microsoft Edge to read books you've acquired until early July 2019. What happens to books I've pre-ordered with delivery after April 2, 2019?

Your pre-order will be cancelled, and you will not be charged for the purchase. We recommend you pre-order at another digital book store. How do I get my refund?

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 If your original payment method is no longer valid and on file with us, you will receive a credit back to your Microsoft account for use online in Microsoft Store.

This seems about as good as can be expected for shuttering a digital store. There have been plenty of others that have not closed with such generous terms (any Plays For Sure™ store, Nintendo Virtual Console, etc.).

For years I've thought that there needs to be precedent for the right of first sale extending to digital purchases, which would help in these situations. As a licensee of a digital work, format shifting should be supported whenever a DRM'd marketplace like this needs to close. Consumers should be provided decryption keys as necessary when a company terminates required DRM servers. Perhaps they can be held in escrow and publicly released for some pre-determined period that overlaps with the final days of the service.

I'm glad these customers have been "made whole" (minus inflation), but it's really not Microsoft's place to be able to claw back an item a person has in their possession. It doesn't apply to physical books, why should it apply just because the medium has changed?

Digital rights management is the only application I can think of that stands to benefit from blockchain. (Other than money laundering, of course.)

A blockchain would work but is not necessary, and such a scheme would just pushes the storage and computational burden of the bookkeeping onto other users of the same chain. It still wouldn't help you if no provider were willing to honor your entitlement, which is what's going on here. You could achieve the same effect, and have a very similar set of failure modes, with digital signatures and emailing product keys or QR codes or whatnot into people's emails.

A few months ago, news broke that UltraViolet [1] would shut down. It was a meta-DRM scheme that, for all practical purposes, was equivalent to a mapping of 'Email Address' -> 'Set of Entitlements'. Various motion picture rightsholders and digital media-serving providers integrated with it, so your rights could be imported and exported into their central list and grow over time. Although the service cost money to run, its decommissioning and the aftermath of your entitlements is a question of political will, and not a question of any technical reality. Vudu is one of the very few providers through whom you can bridge your rights over to its competitor-turned-replacement, Disney's Movies Anywhere.

If there were the political will to do so, the damn hashmap of rights could've transferred directly, but it didn't. Altering the storage scheme would've altered the basic economics of UltraViolet's hosting, but it's not an armor against studio after studio withdrawing from issuing and honoring such rights, as it actually happened.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraViolet_(system)

I guess I was imagining something decentralized where you wouldn’t need a “provider” beyond the author, the chain, and maybe some sort of “smart contract.”

My blockchain knowledge pretty much starts and ends with the legal aspects of cryptocurrency but I guess I was imagining a system where Ernest Hemingway, for example, could upload his latest novel (or maybe a hash?) to the chain and sell access tokens. So any time a user tries to access the file it can only be read if they have an access token for that novel’s ISBN.

Once the book is on blockchain it’s theoretically there forever, right? (Not sure how this works exactly - does at least one other machine on the chain need to be running?) But I don’t think it could be removed as easily as shutting down a server like Microsoft did. Or be censored/restricted by a government.

I suppose you’re right that there would still need to be an iBooks/Kindle type centralized reader/token wallet app or else it would be a total pain for users.

blockchain is just a data structure; money laundering is mostly related to a public/decentralized cryptocurrency (though money laundering existed long before bitcoin, probably over a thousand years)

I personally wouldn't want launder money (or really conduct any business) through a system with an immutable, public ledger.

It's especially odd that the DRM was designed so that even free books had to be clawed back.

Hopefully people will finally learn their lesson about buying DRMed stuff....

but I doubt it.

Most people are probably excited to be getting refunded for books they have already read.

Probably the refund does not account for inflation, though.

500 dollars today may not have the same purchase power of 500 dollars a few years ago.

Yes, I am always disappointed when the unexpected refunds for things I considered worthless don't account for inflation.

That's not the point of a personal library.

What if they didn't care about building a personal library, but only wanted to read a couple of good books?

Would you say going to the cinema is also a waste, because you can not keep the movie you watched?

I'm aware of the issues, I just decided it doesn't really matter. It is rare that I want to read a book twice, or that somebody wants to borrow a book from me.

Rather than wasting storage space for books, it is probably more efficient to rebuy books when I want to read them again. Or bet on ebooks.

And even once they’ve “learned their lesson” what do you propose they purchase instead? The non-DRM alternatives are often no where near as convenient, if they’re available at all.

Well having your book collection suddenly deleted is not convenient either...

So, the alternatives: 1. Buying a real/paper book 2. Pirating/illegal downloading

The best option seems doing both, you support the author by buying the real book, and download a pirated copy for convenience.

I buy physical copies. In the cases where I buy digital media, I strip the DRM. I also support DRM-free vendors, like gog.com.

You can't depend on companies to honor their agreements in perpetuity, especially when there's no direct, ongoing economic incentive to do so.

DRM-free eBooks aren't actually all that hard to find, though it varies by publisher. There are plenty of publishers who sell all of their books DRM-free. And plenty of larger platforms like Kobo tell you at the bottom whether it's a DRM-free EPUB or has Adobe DRM attached, etc.

Who wants a future where you library suddenly disappears because the service wasn't profitable enough for the company? Does anybody actually think that's a good idea?