Microsoft is shutting down Books in Microsoft Store
Microsoft revealed today on a new support page that it is closing the books category in Microsoft Store effective immediately.
Microsoft Store customers cannot buy new ebooks anymore from today on, the category is no longer listed in the Store.
Customers who have bought ebooks in the Microsoft Store will lose access to these books starting July 2019. Microsoft will give customers a full refund for any purchased books provided that the original payment method is still valid. Customer whose payment method is no longer valid and customers who paid using gift cards or Store credit receive Microsoft Store credit instead.
Commercial and free ebooks will be removed starting July 2019. Customers can read the books and access notes until July 2019. Customers who added notes to books will receive an extra $25 credit to their Microsoft Account.
Microsoft made Microsoft Edge the default ebook reader on Windows 10 when it launched the Creators Update back in 2017. Books in Microsoft Edge will be removed at the same time.
Microsoft did not roll out the book category of the Microsoft Store to regions outside the United States which suggests that the closure affects a limited number of users.
The book category is not the first that Microsoft removed from Store; the company discontinued Groove Music and Music Pass in 2017 and retired Groove Music for iOS and Android in 2018.
Closing Words
Microsoft customers who purchased books or downloaded free books have until July 2019 to read them. Notes will be lost when Microsoft removes access and the company has not revealed any plans to offer export options.
The discontinuation demonstrates something (again) that I have been preaching for years: online purchases may be convenient but you may lose access to digital products at any time. It is not only small companies that put your purchases at risk. If one of the world's most successful companies cannot make it, it could be any company that does so.
Microsoft refunding purchases is the only right way to deal with the closure. While that won't help customers who invested time and money in the Store much, it is better than just closing it down without proper compensation.
For Microsoft, it is the second Store consumer service that it is shutting down. Customers who use the Store to purchase digital games, apps, or media may wonder whether it is such a good idea to make purchases in the Store.
Microsoft seems to be giving up on many consumer products, Windows Phone is another example, and one has to wonder how things will look in a year or two from now.
It makes sense, to a degree at least, to drop services and products that are not lucrative but customers who used these products will feel burned, even if they receive compensation.
Now You: What is your take on Microsoft's current strategy? (via Dr. Windows / Thurott)
Are these articles AI generated?
Now the duplicates are more obvious.
This is below AI generated crap. It is copy of Microsoft Help website article without any relevant supporting text. Anyway you can find this information on many pages.
Yes, but why post the exact same article under a different title twice on the same day (19 march 2023), by two different writers?
1.) Excel Keyboard Shortcuts by Trevor Monteiro.
2.) 70+ Excel Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows by Priyanka Monteiro
Why oh why?
Yeah. Tell me more about “Priyanka Monteiro”. I’m dying to know. Indian-Portuguese bot ?
Probably they will announce that the taskbar will be placed at top, right or left, at your will.
Special event by they is a special crap for us.
If it’s Microsoft, don’t buy it.
Better brands at better prices elsewhere.
All new articles have zero count comments. :S
WTF? So, If I add one photo to 5 albums, will it count 5x on my storage?
It does not make any sense… on google photos, we can add photo to multiple albums, and it does not generate any additional space usage
I have O365 until end of this year, mostly for onedrive and probably will jump into google one
Photo storage must be kept free because customers chose gadgets just for photos and photos only.
What a nonsense. Does it mean that albums are de facto folders with copies of our pictures?
Sounds exactly like the poor coding Microsoft is known for in non-critical areas i.e. non Windows Core/Office Core.
I imagine a manager gave an employee the task to create the album feature with hardly any time so they just copied the folder feature with some cosmetic changes.
And now that they discovered what poor management results in do they go back and do the album feature properly?
Nope, just charge the customer twice.
Sounds like a go-getter that needs to be promoted for increasing sales and managing underlings “efficiently”, said the next layer of middle management.
When will those comments get fixed? Was every editor here replaced by AI and no one even works on this site?
Instead of a software company, Microsoft is now a fraud company.
For me this is proof that Microsoft has a back-door option into all accounts in their cloud.
quote “…… as the MSA key allowed the hacker group access to virtually any cloud account at Microsoft…..”
unquote
so this MSA key which is available to MS officers can give access to all accounts in MS cloud.This is the backdoor that MS has into the cloud accounts. Lucky I never got any relevant files of mine in their (MS) cloud.
>”Now You: what is your theory?”
That someone handed an employee a briefcase full of cash and the employee allowed them access to all their accounts and systems.
Anything that requires 5-10 different coincidences to happen is highly unlikely. Occam’s razor.
Good reason to never login to your precious machine with a Microsoft a/c a.k.a. as the cloud.
The GAFAM are always very careless about our software automatically sending to them telemetry and crash dumps in our backs. It’s a reminder not to send them anything when it’s possible to opt out, and not to opt in, considering what they may contain. And there is irony in this carelessness biting them back, even if in that case they show that they are much more cautious when it’s their own data that is at stake.