Microsoft is closing its ebook store. Who cares? The people who have bought books from them care because they will no longer be able to read their books. Microsoft, to its credit is offering to refund the purchase price but why not just keep the authentication server running? How much could it cost?
The author of the linked article paints a dire picture of where all this is leading. It’s a bit overwrought but it’s worth examining the current practice and whether it makes sense. The legal fiction is, “We’re just selling you a license to read the book, not the book itself. We can revoke that license at our will.” Except that hardly anyone thinks like that when they’re buying an ebook.
I’ve written many times about my ongoing efforts to be completely paperless. Part of that is buying ebooks rather than physical books. I really love books and appreciate all the arguments about how they feel and smell but, really, ebooks are just so much more convenient in almost every way that “real” books just don’t make much sense anymore. That, of course, puts me at odds with another of my deeply held “digital tenets:” Keep all important data in an open format.
My guess is that even the hidebound publishing industry will come to see that DRM is against their own interests and give up on it as the music industry has. Whether that happens before Amazon finishes eating their lunch is still an open question.
In any event, the closing of the Microsoft book store should serve as a warning to us all: let someone lock up your data and you could lose it at their whim.