Perils of Cloud Services - This weekend you better read those ebooks you bought from Microsoft – because they'll be dead come next week

If you bought an ebook through Microsoft's online store, now's the time to give it a read, or reread, because it will stop working early July.

That's right, the books you paid for will be literally removed from your electronic bookshelf because, um, Microsoft decided in April it no longer wanted to sell books. It will turn off the servers that check whether your copy was bought legitimately – using the usual anti-piracy digital-rights-management (DRM) tech – and that means your book can't be verified as being in the hands of its purchaser, and so won't be displayed.

This is the downside of most cloud services... if/when the cloud provider sells up or changes focus or shuts down you have zero control over the service and often the information too. In many cases, you won't have a working application to use the information. Be wary of the sales hype and be sure to keep to using open data standards and plan for exiting the cloud service.

See #^https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/06/28/microsoft_ebooks_death/

#cloud
#^This weekend you better read those ebooks you bought from Microsoft – because they'll be dead come next week

The major problem with anti-piracy DRM, part 1024

source https://gadgeteer.co.za/node/3316