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Microsoft's eBook Apocalypse Shows the Dark Side of DRM
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nathantotten 7y ago> Microsoft will refund customers in full for what they paid, plus an extra $25 if they made annotations or mark-ups. Doesn’t seem all that nefarious. Get your money back, order the paperbacks. No DRM issues again.
- ssivark 7y agoAnd what about the hours of effort put into reading, annotating, and jotting down notes on the ebook? (Typical of serious reading/research) That is worth way more than $25 -- MS is robbing people of the value they tried to create/store for their future selves. What use is a "platform" if it can't support that?
- zaroth 7y agoThis happens every week for people using some SaaS product that gets cancelled. DRM is content as a service, and by definition, all DRM will either be cracked or will become inaccessible eventually with probability approach 1 over time.
- rbmktechik 7y agoHow dare you take away my right to be outraged at tech giants....
- dang 7y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive comments to HN.
- akerro 7y agoIt's more a trust issue in a technology. Pirated ebooks don't have DRM and never expire, can be opened on any device and you keep the money anyway.
- pjmlp 7y agoOr never buy DRM books to start with. I own a Kindle, however I only buy ebooks from stores that offer epub and PDF as well. At max with watermarks.
- bad_user 7y agoAny recommendations for such stores? I know of https://www.downpour.com https://www.downpour.com for audio books and I get all my audio books from them since they are DRM-free. Would love to know of such a service for ebooks, but for fiction.
- winterbc 7y agoDon’t forget https://www.humblebundle.com/ https://www.humblebundle.com/ for frequent book bundles.
- nyolfen 7y agotor is a scifi/fantasy+adjacent publisher that famously offers drm-free ebooks https://www.tor.com/ https://www.tor.com/
- ulysses 7y agoBaen Books https://www.baen.com/ https://www.baen.com/ They have always been very customer friendly. They have a "free library" section, too. (Often has such things as the first book in a series.) J Novel Club https://j-novel.club/top https://j-novel.club/top Translated Japanese light novels. There's a membership that lets you read along as they translate, but if you purchase the ebook when they're done, it's DRM free. And of course http://www.gutenberg.org/ http://www.gutenberg.org/
- dabockster 7y ago
- intopieces 7y agoThis assumes that the paperback exists. It ought to be the responsibility of the vendor to offer either a full refund or a hard copy, at the vendor's expense, including any annotations that were made on the digital copy.
- brewdad 7y agoWhile having such an option may be a good idea, one of the main appeals of ebooks for me is that I already have far too many linear feet of paper books. Giving me a hard copy adds to this problem. Either way, let me annotate my own paper book TYVM.
- Fnoord 7y agoThat's still showing the dark side of DRM. However it is also Microsoft handling that dark side in a professional way. If a game developer shuts down their game servers, do they release the binaries? Some do, I guess. I've even seen some software companies release the source if/when they shut down.
- icebraining 7y agoSeems very unlikely that MS can unilaterally release other people's books without DRM.
- m-p-3 7y agoAt least this time it's Microsoft closing down gracefully. I can't see the same happening if it's a smaller, specialized business going bankrupt and going away without the ability to mitigate the shutdown.
- reaperducer 7y agoGet your money back, order the paperbacks. From where? The bookstores that no longer exist? Or hope that there is a 1/1000 chance you might get lucky and find one on fleaBay?
- Mindwipe 7y agoAnd if you don't tend to read the books again, you've made out like a bandit.
- Mountain_Skies 7y agoIf nothing else, at least this might get tech companies to pause and think before entering a market just because one of their competitors entered that market.
- inlined 7y ago1. How much cost is really involved in keeping up the DRM server in maintenance mode on Azure? 2. Maybe this will give the EFF enough case study to argue (successfully, finally) that the DMCA allows corporations to create rules that violate other existing laws such as the right of first sale.
- ChrisLomont 7y agoThe right sale doctrine doesn’t apply to products like these; these are licenses to use. If they were first sale doctrine products, you could sell your goods on secondary markets, which you cannot.
- arghwhat 7y agoThere should be some crackdown on selling licenses over products. It is abused to absurd extends.
- SomeOldThrow 7y agoIndeed. Some stores sell this license above market rate as well compared to an actual purchase of a good. Infuriating.
- inlined 7y agoThat’s a descriptive argument (describing what is, based on technicalities). I’m making a proscriptive argument about what should be. When DRM replaces an entire market, it’s reasonable for customers to have similar expectations. Eg when I die, I should be able to bequeath my library.
- nitrogen 7y agoHas that been decided by the courts for the various digital product types (software, books, music, videos, etc.)?
- cortesoft 7y agoSo does the first sale doctrine not have any teeth at all? What is to stop companies from throwing a license on everything they sell, making the first sale doctrine meaningless? Could a bookseller add a license to a physical book, and suddenly you can't sell it or lend it out?
- nxc18 7y agoThis isn’t the first time for MS, and certainly not the first time the dark side of DRM has shown itself. MSN music: https://www.cnet.com/news/defunct-msn-music-has-a-drm-controversy-on-its-hands/ https://www.cnet.com/news/defunct-msn-music-has-a-drm-contro... Zune’s servers shut down in 2017, but at least you could download free MP3 versions of everything. https://www.thurrott.com/music-videos/groove-music/82201/buy-music-zune-2012-please-read https://www.thurrott.com/music-videos/groove-music/82201/buy...
- xvilka 7y agoThe whole Microsoft is one big dark side. Ok, just 80% of it.
- kabdib 7y agoMicrosoft's Games for Windows Live DRM servers had a close call a few years ago as well.
- Arwill 7y agoSeems like that they in a typical Microsoft style tried to link one product to another. I can imagine that the boss of the Edge browser argued to make their bookstore Edge-only, to promote the browser that way. And that move effectively doomed the bookstore. Its like you go to Microsoft site to search for a registry problem, and the support person tells you to use Cortana to search. Because obviously his job is not to solve your registry problem, it is to promote Cortana for Microsoft.
- bad_user 7y agoFor audio books I buy only from Downpour.com because they are DRM-free. Any recommendations for a site selling DRM-FREE ebooks for fiction?
- shadowoflight 7y agoI haven’t used them personally, but there are several mentioned in the replies to this tweet about the MS eBook shutdown: https://twitter.com/rdonoghue/status/1144011630197522432?s=2 https://twitter.com/rdonoghue/status/1144011630197522432?s=2
- 0815test 7y agoFiction? What's wrong with just perusing gutenberg.org for that. If you really care about paying them for the e-books, they do take donations.
- nitrogen 7y agoSome genres and themes have to be current to be enjoyable, and since the authors are living it's worth supporting them. So Gutenberg is awesome, but not sufficient for one's full literary diet.
- rambo4 7y agoThis is why i crack the drm of all ebooks i buy and convert them to pdf.
- nyreed 7y agoI mean, honestly this was clear from the moment online stores with DRM'd media started appearing. If it's not stored on your own device in a DRM free format, it can disappear at any time. It's less 'the dark side of DRM', and more simply that DRM requires actively maintained infrastructure. When the business case isn't there to pay for that anymore (or the company goes bust), then what else can one expect?
- inlined 7y agoEngineering has the concept of “fail safe”. It literally means that the failure mode is a safe mode. If the dns of the DRM server can no longer be reached, a fail safe would allow the book to continue to be read.
- cheerlessbog 7y agoWouldn't it be easy to fool such a check?
- hyperman1 7y agoMost DRM is trivially easy to fool: Just pirate. When you circumvent DRM, you are pirating, except you paid for the privilege. You probably also have a bigger risk of being caught, as you still run the DRM software.
- guitarbill 7y agowell, you're still supporting the people behind the works, which - believe it or not - i like to do. and also, while the iso/tv/movie scene has strict quality rules, the ebook "scene" seems more ad-hoc. pirated ebooks are sometimes OCR scans with tonnes of spelling mistakes or weird formatting, or ancient editions. in short, de-DRM can still be preferable.
- cthaeh 7y agoYour clearly not looking in the right places. You can find good quality, recent edition copies of any relatively popular book online now.
- jseliger 7y agoThere are de-DRM tools for the Kindle; I bought almost no Kindle books prior to finding them. Now I'm willing to buy some because it's relatively easy to remove the DRM.
- Havoc 7y agoThat’s why is started decrypting and making backups of my ebooks. Happy to play the corporate’s game but only to a point. And it’s clear that one need a plan B cause corporates will go nuclear without hesitation. So I don’t feel bad at all about bending the rules on this
- remicmacs 7y agoSame here. Most of my ebooks are bought DRM-free. But some times I want a book from a publisher that does not do DRM-free publishing. And EVERY TIME, it's a hassle : I have to link my e-reader to a specific website account. This account itself has to be linked to my email address, since there is no way to register anywhere without email nowadays... Anyway, that makes me REALLY annoyed, so I break the DRM protection every time, just to avoid another hassle next time I reset my ereader, my Calibre library, or any other event. Granted that does not happen very often, but I'll do anything to avoid yet another 2FA voodoo ritual across multiple online platforms just to claim ownership on a 100 pages book. I mean, come on !
- olliej 7y agoIt’s not the dark side, it’s the designed in primary side. The ability to view drm’d content is almost just an optional side benefit. I still think legislation should require any product sold with a buy/purchase button should be required to continue functioning even if the “product” is shut down.
- inlined 7y agoThat’s what’s so infuriating about DRM. Lawyers may argue that we clicked OK to some fine print somewhere, but the product is advertised as something you buy, not something you lease. That’s why I feel like the right of first sale should be legally protected.
- olliej 7y agoWait you don’t read a hundred pages of small legalese before you spend $1 on a song? Are you crazy? Who would ever skip reading such a document?
- acd 7y agoThe planet is on fire because we consume to much stuff. We should have the right to repair things we own. Corporate lobbying is not in the general democratic interest of the people and should be forbidden.
- blueadept111 7y agoThe dark side of physical books: sometimes you buy a book and then you lose it.
- behringer 7y agoSometimes Barnes & Noble break and enter my house and take off with my bookshelves. Oh wait, nevermind, that's never actually happened.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 13of40 7y agoA better analogy: Barnes and Noble sets up a reading room down the street where you can pay a discounted amount to read books rather than buy them. One day you stop by and the place is boarded up, but the guy outside apologizes and explains that they had to close because it wasn't making enough money, then he gives you a full refund plus $25.
- guitarbill 7y agoi don't think this holds. ebooks are often the same price as paperbacks, and you still have to buy them individually. okay, they're refunding people, which is a decent enough move (still inconvenient though). presumably, they didn't do it out of the kindness of their own heart, but to avoid controversy/lawsuits, what with public opinion slowly swinging away from DRM and towards right to repair.
- Mindwipe 7y ago> ebooks are often the same price as paperbacks Not really.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoDiscounted? Ebooks cost more than paperbacks in many cases.
- thejenk 7y agoIt doesn't make sense to me that eBook retailers can claim they're selling licences to view books, instead of the books themselves. If I were to look for 1984 for a kindle, I'd: 1. Search Amazon for "1984 George Orwell" 2. Select the first option (paperback) 3. See the "Format" selector 4. Select the kindle edition 5. Click "Buy with one-click" Notably, between 4 and 5, reading the entire page gives no indication that the kindle format is fundamentally different from the paperback in regards to who actually owns the copy after purchase. There may be a notice buried in a EULA that you agree to when setting the device up, but it may be hard to argue that it means they can tell you at the time of purchase they're selling you a book while actually selling you a licence.
- inlined 7y agoDid you pick 1984 because ironically it was once wiped from all kindles? https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...
- thejenk 7y agoYes, actually. Because that event was referenced in the original article, which made it the last book I had thought about.
- grimskin 7y agoI'd like to be devil's advocate here - in case of Orwell books, given that publisher had no rights for them, the situation is similar to the selling of stolen goods.
- thejenk 7y agoI actually agree that it's a situation that's unrelated to whether the retailer is selling licenses or copies of the book, which is what my original comment is about. I do think that Amazon could have handled the situation better though. It probably would have been to everyone's benefit for them to work out the issue with the rights holders instead of passing their mistake forward to their customers. They may have tried to do that behind closed doors and failed, of course.
- Mikeb85 7y agoAnd this is why I only 'buy' eBooks if they're dirt cheap (<$5). Even then if I really enjoy them I'll buy a physical copy.
- dbcurtis 7y agoAgree, but to add to that, I buy ebooks that date quickly. If it is a software reference or investment analysys or something that is dated and irrelevant in 2 or 3 years, I don’t really care if it evaporates. Which I guess is feeding he beast.
- darkpuma 7y agoDRM on old model kindles is trivial to crack, the key is apparently derived from your kindle's serial number. For this reason, I transferred all of my kindle ebooks to my oldest kindle, and was then able to strip DRM from the entire library and convert to epub with Calibre+plugins. I wager there will probably come a day when Amazon refuses to send newly purchased ebooks to old models of kindles.
- topkai22 7y agoI think the real issue here is an improper definition of the word “buy” from a truth in advertising perspective. I think if a company says you are “buying” a digital good, then that good than access to that good should be required to be perpetual, irrevocable, available offline, and enable the user to back up to their choice of media. This doesn't preclude the use of DRM in its entirety but is very close to the experience of buying and owning physical media, which I think meets the common perception of what "buying" means. For companies wanting to use the current DRM paradigm, they should be required to use an alternate, accurate term such as "license." Of course this is becoming increasingly academic with the rise of subscription services, where I think all parties are aware that content is impermanent and the relationship is defined month to month.
- pmlnr 7y agoI'm genuinely curious - what is the "light" side of DRM?
- awakeasleep 7y agoAllows businesses to extract greater profits from their existing portfolio
- pmlnr 7y agoIn the end, most of the world's problems can be traced back greed. I suggest to add the word "profit" to the list of synonyms of greed.
- scarface74 7y agoDo you work for a for profit company?
- cheerlessbog 7y agoI can pay $10 a month to listen to any song anywhere. I assume it would cost more if I could trivially download them and stop paying. For me that is something positive. But I'm well aware in this case that I'm not purchasing any long term licenses.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoI think you may have it backwards -- it was trivial to download and listen to music and movies (Napster, Popcorntime, etc.) -- which provided pressure to produce low cost, high availability media sources. People in general want to support artists/creators and be law-abiding. Once the media corps provided easy, reasonable cost, ways to get enough of the media then people shied away from the copyright infringement that had otherwise become the easiest way to consume such media.
- h2odragon 7y agoupdates, enhancements, customer communication... none of which are notably wanting for ebooks, or require DRM.
- jccalhoun 7y agoWhen you buy things with DRM you get what you pay for: nothing. I only "buy" drm'ed products that I know I can break the drm for like kindle books and even then I rarely buy them.
- rb808 7y agoWhen my grandfather died he left behind a huge library of books. Many were junk, some were gold. I have a bunch of ebooks, I guess no one will ever see them again.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoSounds like we need to go back to the deposit libraries that were part of copyright in the early days.
- kerng 7y agoSame happened with Zune to me, all the music turned useless at one point...
- Tempest1981 7y agoPrevious discussion: (434 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20297331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20297331
- shmerl 7y agoDon't buy DRMed goods. If you did for some reason, make sure to break DRM and back up what you bought. And there should be a stronger push to repeal corrupt DMCA-1201 and the like.
- Lammy 7y agoWhen the article mentioned Walmart's 2008 "MP3 Store" shutdown I thought the author was about to relate it to the eBook store closure via the fact that they were both Microsoft DRM systems under the hood, but the author was only comparing them ideologically. I wonder if he knew that the Walmart "MP3 store" was actually a "PlaysForSure WMA store" originally and that the Microsoft PlaysForSure shutdown is the reason for the cited 2008 shut down. From https://help.walmart.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/63/~/music-downloads https://help.walmart.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/63/~/music-... : "If you downloaded music from Walmart before February 2008, some of your music files may be in the Windows Media Audio (WMA) format." Walmart shifted to selling 256k non-DRM MP3s after that, and then that store was also killed in 2011: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/08/walmart-pulling-the-plug-on-its-mp3-store-but-not-its-drm-servers/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/08/walma... I also can't think of the Walmart music store without thinking of this dramatic reading of a timeless 2004 (!) rant about the usability of the Walmart store in non-Microsoft browsers/players. The SWF probably won't play for most of you, but the original post is screenshotted below it: https://www.somethingawful.com/flash-tub/letter-from-internet/ https://www.somethingawful.com/flash-tub/letter-from-interne...
- kpwags 7y agoThis is why people should be legally allowed to remove the DRM from the items they purchase. I see no reason why I shouldn't be able to remove the DRM from the books I buy for my Kindle or the like. Assuming I don't share them with friends, family or strangers (which is a different issue), the authors, publishers, & copyright holders aren't losing sales.
- linuxhansl 7y agoWell, Dah...? In discussions with friends I always say "Imagine all the old books would have been e-books, and all the old DRM servers are gone. Now what?" I have never (and will never) owned an e-book, unless it is a free of DRM.
- xg15 7y ago> And because of digital rights management—the mechanism by which platforms retain control over the digital goods they sell—you have no recourse I feel this is actually the relevant point - and just a sign of the things to come. What's done with systems like DRM - but what is also directly integrated into many new products - is the ability of a producer to essentially keep full control over a product throughtout its whole lifetime - in particular, even after it was sold. You can see this trend in a lot of different areas: IoT, connected cars, game consoles and games that must always have an internet connection, subscription-only software, etc. I believe, consumer protections are not even remotely compared to this kind of model.
- rambo5 7y agoAlways crack drm and save ebooks as pdf
- malodyets 7y agoPublishers need to ensure that selling a copy of a book to someone does not mean that 10,000 copies are downloaded for free because that book was uploaded to a free download site. That can't happen with physical books in the same way — yes, you can scan pages and upload a PDF of the page images, but it's often a much poorer reading experience (although there was a story here just last week about bad actors selling photocopy duplicates on Amazon). This is a hard problem for publishers. Some publishers have decided to sell ebooks without DRM — though the biggest example of this that I always pointed to for years and years, O'Reilly, stopped selling ebooks directly in 2017.[1] (It appears from that article that DRM/piracy concerns were not primary for O'Reilly, but the unprofitability of their ebook store and the rising profitability of their subscription business.) [1] https://www.thebookseller.com/futurebook/why-oreilly-media-no-longer-selling-books-online-607871 https://www.thebookseller.com/futurebook/why-oreilly-media-n... Most publishers don't believe that it is in their best interest to sell DRM-free ebooks. (This includes all the publishers I have done business with, which is a fairly representative sample). It's not that they're trying to get rich, it's that they're trying to stay alive. Ebook sales have been declining or at best have stabilized. Physical bookstores are declining. Publishers have a fear-hate-dependency relationship with Amazon, so they would like to sell ebooks directly, but very few have achieved any profitability there, and they don't believe that selling digital files without some form of digital copy protection is going to lead to more sales. I have not been arguing here for DRM, I am simply telling you the reality of the publishing business and how it is grappling with a very different distribution environment than what we had 20+ years ago before there was such a thing as ebooks.[2] [2] I built my first commercially distributed ebooks in 2000 for the (old) Microsoft Reader, Palm, and Rocket Ebook platforms. I've been in the publishing industry since 1997. Now I will argue for DRM — or at least, for finding a solution that works for everyone. I would like to think that DRM-free ebook distribution would work for publishers, and I used to try to convince them that they should move in that direction, but two things dampened my idealism: (1) my aforementioned experience talking with western publishers about DRM-free distribution. (2) I started talking with publishers in developing-world cultures. Many of these publishers (especially in post-colonial contexts, where books were traditionally donated by ministries and thus were free) have a very hard time making ends meet, and they cannot envision getting their customers to pay for digital files that don't have some kind of protection. There is too much precedent in those places for both books and digital files to be free. In short, very few publishers are going to embrace a solution that fails to protect their content. If you buy a copy, they need to be able to ensure that it remains a single copy. But at the same time, few publishers think, "I love having my customers locked into Amazon's platform. It's so good for my business that Amazon owns my customers." What we need is a system in which: * publishers and distributors can sell ebooks to customers and ensure that those ebooks are protected as single copies * customers can buy ebooks and ensure that they will always have access to those ebooks, on any platform that they own, no matter whose DRM servers go down (because no single entity owns the DRM / licensing platform) * customers can loan / given their ebooks to others, either permanently or for a limited period of time * bonus: publishers (and therefore authors!) get a royalty on the resale * important: buyers' full purchase history is knowable only by the buyers themselves I believe the technical infrastructure to make this sort of system possible are just now being put into place. And I believe that someone will succeed in designing, building, and selling it to the publishing industry in the next few years. And yes, I'm looking forward to it: I would like to see the publishing industry much less dependent of a single all-powerful distributor, and more able to sell directly to their customers without intermediaries and without fear. And as a reader, I would like to be able to buy digital books (and movies, for that matter) and know that I will always have access to those copies, no matter what, without being dependent on a single distributor. Or resell them if I so choose. [edited to reformat because hacker news doesn't speak Markdown]
- Nasrudith 7y agoThere is a non-dark side to DRM? Seriously, it just makes everything worse out of a misguided sense of greed and scarcity while not stopping piracy. The whole concept of DRM is certifiable. Asking to have something accessible yet not accessible to the end client at the exact same time. When it can be bypassed by capturing the output channel anyway on top of that.
- gingeruser206 7y ago“Originally intended as an anti-piracy measure, DRM now functions mostly as a way to lock customers into a given ecosystem, rather than reading or viewing or listening to their purchases wherever they want. It’s a cycle that has persisted for decades, and shows no signs of abating.” This is precisely why I use Calibre with KyBook 3. You can import ePub and pdf formats and no DRM of course.