Microsoft:
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.
Nothing but props for the way Microsoft is handling this. What more could you possibly want them to do? They can’t compete with Amazon and Apple and they’ve turned out the lights. And given folks their money back, to boot.
But this does remind me that we own less and less as consumers. More and more, we license our music, rather than own MP3s, discs and LPs. No more daily papers, no more loaded bookshelves full of favorites we loan to friends.
No more fully working copies of Photoshop, Illustrator, Word, or Excel. It’s all licensed goods.
Not that this is even remotely likely, if Adobe went out of business, you’d lose access to Creative Cloud. If Microsoft went under, you’d lose access to Office 365.
Imagine if Tesla went under. Would the software in your car continue to work? Probably. But no more updates. And that self driving mode? Without updates? That’d be scary.
Don’t mean to be a curmudgeon here. But Microsoft just took their books back.
Imagine if Apple or Amazon, one day, closed their book stores. I don’t think it’s a question of if, but more a question of when. No one is immune from the shifting sands of ‘progress’.
Classy move to give their money back, though.
I have two big problems with this new “you own nothing” world. Firstly, businesses aren’t upfront about about the fact that you’re paying for limited access to things, and like to imply that you actually own the thing. Secondly we’re charged ownership prices, not rental ones. When applications moved to subscriptions, I ended up paying a lot more on a yearly basis for things that can disappear on a whim than I did for things I could use until they stopped working. I, personally, have no issue with things like Amazon Prime, Spotify, or Comixology Unlimited. They’re good value for the money, and they tell me: when you stop paying you lose access.
A “credit in the Microsoft Store” is absolutely *not* the same as getting one’s “money back”. (You only get your money back if the payment method you used for the purchase is still valid. If your credit card has expired, you’re SOL.)
Imagine if Tesla went under. Who’d repair them, and with what parts?
I don’t want to own physical books by the roomful, myself.
(I do, however, immediately de-DRM and backup my eBook purchases.)
Independent mechanics, with aftermarket parts made to purpose?
You can get repairs done on literally any car ever made – it’s just a question of how much you have to pay.
(And of course, if Tesla goes bankrupt, their IP and such will be sold off. If there are enough Teslas out there to matter, someone will buy that IP to make repair parts for the awkward computerized/DRM parts.)
Let’s hope the aftermarket parts are all up to Tesla’s specs.
Considering “ownership” as limited to those things within physical grasp is an exercise in futility, if not actual degradation. Being bound to material possessions gets you what? Nothing of any lasting value or benefit.
I like the concept of licensing and subscription. With Creative Cloud, I always have access to the latest versions of my software tools. With Apple Music, I don’t have to buy whole albums if a group only put out one song that didn’t suck. With Tesla, I have car that I can potentially power off the grid with solar, and a car I can drive cross country without buying gasoline.
It’s all a matter of perspective. And I couldn’t care less if Microsoft continues to fail at various initiatives.
I’d be pretty happy with a refund of every book I’ve ever bought. I would make a list first of the ones I want and re-purchase them after.