Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 297 posts

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#31

Post by flukus »

gnicholas wrote: post #18

> But with the 5G boom about to hit, experts will tell you we’re set to see a massive increase in connected devices and appliances, many of which we’ll probably only be able to licence, rather than own. Why is this more likely with 5G than 4G? What appliances are not suitable for IOT right now, but will be with 5G? Would most of my appliances be in my home, where I have wifi?

With 5G it will be faster and cheaper for IoT companies to unobtrusively collect surveillance data about you, they'll be giving them away.

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#32

Post by asveikau »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #24
asveikau wrote: post #8

I didn't start buying ebooks from Amazon/Kindle until I realized it was relatively easy to break its DRM. I've never used the files anywhere else but I keep a cracked copy of every purchase just in case. That old story about "1984" being removed gave me too much of a negative impression.

So they still get your money and you deal with the inconvenience? Try buying from https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebooks where possible (DRM-free).

Thanks for the tip, will consider it next time. I guess I was non-mainstream enough to look into breaking DRM, but not non-mainstream enough to consider less popular sources.

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#33

Post by r3bl »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #24
asveikau wrote: post #8

I didn't start buying ebooks from Amazon/Kindle until I realized it was relatively easy to break its DRM. I've never used the files anywhere else but I keep a cracked copy of every purchase just in case. That old story about "1984" being removed gave me too much of a negative impression.

So they still get your money and you deal with the inconvenience? Try buying from https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebooks where possible (DRM-free).

Inconvenience?

It's really not that complicated. You download them from a web interface and you drag and drop them into Calibre (with a de-DRM plugin installed). Done, they're now available together with all the ebooks that you got from other sources.

Having all the purchased ebooks in one place is more convenient for me, not less. The alternative isn't a different book store, it's pirating. While I do have an appreciation for all the books I got from DRM-free places, I don't pick what I'm going to read next based on where it's available. The majority of the books I want to read are available on Amazon, and breaking their DRM is very easy. They wouldn't get my money if any of those two were untrue. I'd probably revert back to pirating.

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#34

Post by ocdtrekkie »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #5

This is the second time I've lost eBooks to Microsoft. The first time was some time in the late 90s, when I used to read books on the bus on my Compaq iPAQ PocketPC PDA, using an app which I think was called Microsoft Reader? The books were of course DRM'd. Eventually the app disappeared and those files are now useless.

Yeah, I bought a few LIT format eBooks off of Amazon back in the day (predating Kindle, I believe). I think I might still have them somewhere with the DRM broken, but obviously, newer formats are nicer.

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#35

Post by durability »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #23
frosted-flakes wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do the same with Audible. As far as I can tell, there's no way to remove the DRM that is both easy and free, so against my better judgement, I paid $30 for a program to do it for me[0]. I now have every audiobook I've bought in mp3 format, split by chapter and tagged with the correct metadata. Now I can dump them on a USB drive and plug it into my car stereo for road trips (I don't mind listening to good books more…

Keep your $30. Or... Pay me $30 :) ffmpeg -activation_bytes 1CEB00DA -i test.aax -vn -c:a copy output.mp4

Does this really work?

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#36

Post by gnicholas »

nil-sec wrote: post #26
gnicholas wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Annotations would presumably be lost as well (if the platform supported them).

Maybe. But these are all hypotheticals. The article presents it as I should be morally disgusted by this move. I don't really see it.

Hypothetical? Every major ebook platform offers annotations (and I just checked — this platform did too). MS apparently recognizes the additional inconvenience to people who have annotated, as they are offering an extra $25 to anyone who has made annotations. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4497396

I agree that this closure is not world-ending, and I think the point of the article is that if MS can do this to your ebooks, then other big tech companies could do it to your other content too.

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#37

Post by ocdtrekkie »

rmason wrote: post #10

I'm unfamiliar with Microsoft's eBook offerings and the format upon which they're offered. The old Microsoft would have had a proprietary format unique to themselves but that may not be the case. Why couldn't they convert them to a standard format and put them up on an S3 with a login that pointed people to their virtual folders?

Microsoft's eBooks are EPUB-based. (The current version of Edge works as both an EPUB and PDF reader natively.) If you dig into Edge's data cache, you discover the books are stored in an "MSEPUB" format, and there's another file that contains the license for it.

I imagine it is unlikely to be significantly harder DRM to strip than for other DRM'd EPUBs, but I'm not sure if anyone's bothered to dig in and see if Microsoft changed the file extension because they added some special sauce.

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#38

Post by gnicholas »

flukus wrote: post #31
gnicholas wrote: post #18

> But with the 5G boom about to hit, experts will tell you we’re set to see a massive increase in connected devices and appliances, many of which we’ll probably only be able to licence, rather than own. Why is this more likely with 5G than 4G? What appliances are not suitable for IOT right now, but will be with 5G? Would most of my appliances be in my home, where I have wifi?

With 5G it will be faster and cheaper for IoT companies to unobtrusively collect surveillance data about you, they'll be giving them away.

If this is true, someone here will hopefully make an inward-facing firewall for home networks.

Re: When Microsoft's eBook store closes, your books disappear too

#39

Post by bubblethink »

jammygit wrote: post #21
tomjakubowski wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like another commenter has said, the DRM on Kindle e-books is pretty easy to break. https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com

Isn't it technically a crime though? That's the kicker: the legislative backing to the schemes. Its a matter of time until this GS are so locked down that circumvention becomes impractical, even if its several years in the future. The 'it doesn't work' argument is temporary unless there is enough pushback (as happened with music, thankfully)

>(as happened with music, thankfully)

The main reason it didn't happen with (sold) music was that audio cds were already unencumbered. So it made even less sense than usual to tack on additional DRM. And finally, the most popular form of consuming music now is streaming, which does have DRM generally.

Post reply on HN