Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

Microsoft's eBook service (did you know there was one?) shut down today. All the eBooks went >poof<, de-rezed. (Refunds were offered to those who bought them, but not for the freebies.)

Just in case you think you really own your digital purchases:
The Day the e-books Died

The Cloud giveth, the Cloud taketh away.

I honestly had no idea the Microsoft Store even had an "ebook" business to get out of. That probably has something to do with me having never been to the Microsoft Store, I suppose.

I didn't know about their business, either. Quite a while back, just when ebooks were really taking off, they quit supporting their .lit files. I have a bunch of those & thought that was the end of their ebooks. Luckily, Calibre can easily convert them to .epub or .mobi & I have them as files on my own hard drives.

I don't trust the cloud or anything with DRM. If I can't strip the licensing to back it up to my own drives in a standard format, I won't buy it.

I had a Sony reader when that one died, but fortunately I never bought anything from them (they transfered their content to Kobo so as far as I know people who did buy didn't lose anything but I can't confirm)

It's why I very, very rarely actually buy an ebook, and then the price has to be really low (like 1-2$, I mean ebooks cost as much as trade paperbacks these days and you're not even paying for the paper/shipping/storage/ink/etc). In fact most of my purchases were done when a group read suddenly went on sale in ebook form just before the group read started :) That happened at least 3 times now.

But given the vast amounts of free stuff out there, good free stuff too (Tor, Baen, Gutenberg among others), I'm not lacking in finding things to put on my eReader.

I learned the hard way that I didn't own my ebooks when I switched from a nook to a kindle. That's when DRM first reared its ugly head for me. Callibre couldn't convert all of them.

Michelle wrote: "I learned the hard way that I didn't own my ebooks when I switched from a nook to a kindle. That's when DRM first reared its ugly head for me. Callibre couldn't convert all of them."

Did you install a plug-in to remove the DRM?

Couldn't tell you! I know that more recent books weren't a problem to convert, but my older books were. For example, The Name of the Wind. I had to buy it twice, because it's one of my favorites and it wouldn't convert over to the .mobi format. Now that I've been burnt, I specifically look for the DRM tag before I buy.

I'm sorry to hear that. IMHO, you should try and get instructions to install DRM removal software on Calibre. It does pay off. Good luck!

Strange. None of this is ever a problem with my dead tree books.

First adopters of dead tree books had their problems too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-...

:)

Clouds. Such a stupid concept. Do you trust clouds? They can storm on you or just blow away. If everything has to be digital we should at least be able to store and back up the files ourselves!

Book Nerd wrote: "Clouds. Such a stupid concept. Do you trust clouds? They can storm on you or just blow away. If everything has to be digital we should at least be able to store and back up the files ourselves!"

Agreed. I live in an area where cell & data connections are iffy, at best. I have to download files at work & put them on a device or I won't have them at home. I've also seen pictures, music, & other content lost by users when they changed/lost devices & couldn't recover the licensing information or hadn't migrated the correct files.

No one should support cloud-only or DRM systems. All it does is punish the honest customer, as Apple users found out when their unique recordings were deleted & replaced by standard songs. It doesn't stop piracy, either. If content can be played, it can & will be pirated. If the product is priced properly, easy to obtain, use, & backup, most people will buy legally. Piracy will just be free sample marketing as far as the bottom line is concerned.

Irony: An author friend was highly disappointed when I said I wouldn't buy their audiobooks because they were Audible only. I pointed out they were DRM locked, but they thought that was OK in their case. They didn't want their books pirated, but I'd just given them instructions on how to remove DRM on some new CDs they'd bought which wouldn't play on their high-end CD player. It was too old to support the new DRM system that plagued us at the time, but fine in all other respects. They thought it unfair that a music company would try to force them into replacing their good equipment with new simply to support their DRM scheme. They couldn't seem to make the connection.

xkcd covered this well years ago.

Jim wrote: "No one should support cloud-only or DRM systems. All it does is punish the honest customer"

Actually, I thought that was the point *smirk*. Why sell something to your customers once when you can find a way to sell it to them over and over again. Like VHS -> DVD -> BlueRay -> whatever comes next (I still have a VHS player mind you...) In fact I've stopped buying videos entirely, I record enough on my PVR to keep me busy (though yes, when we had a PVR issue we lost everything...but again, I didn't really pay for them, though I did pay for the service overall), fortunately all those Marvel movies are replayed all the time, I was able to get back a lot of what I lost :)

At least epub, being a public format, is documented for anyone to write a reader for, so aside from DRM, if one of your reader softwares goes out of business there will be others out there (or if you can code, can write your own). mobi is pretty much Amazon only and private, so I've avoided those unless I got them for free. At least if I lose them I didn't pay for them. My Fire tablet is too heavy for regular reading anyway.

With DRM files they also limit the number of device you can copy the file to, so if you machine/device dies a few times or you just wanted to upgrade to the newest and latest, after 5 tries or so you need to re-buy all your stuff.

So companies probably think they are making a lot of money with duplicate buyers, but really they are, as per that image, creating criminals who just want to be able to use what they already paid for (after all when you purchase stuff it doesn't say you're only "renting" it, not buying it). I suspect they are lucky if they are coming out even, balancing those who will rebuy with those that pirate out of desperation.

Andrea wrote: "Actually, I thought that was the point *smirk*. Why sell something to your customers once wh..."

You're right. It is. I also read an article where a publisher defended the high price of ebooks because they cost so much to store. Wish I'd saved a copy of that because the article disappeared a week or two later. All the laughter & raspberries probably destroyed it.

I don't have a problem with newer tech creating a need for new media within reason. I've worn out copies of some paper books & replaced them. I've even bought special editions or updated versions. We've bought new copies of some of our VHS tapes because they look horrible on the new TV, although we kept them until just this year when the little TV with the built-in VCR died since they played fine on that. Better resolution is a valid reason to buy new & all those are my choice, not the merchant's. Number of devices & proprietary formats are not the customers' choice, thus promote piracy, IMO.

Jim wrote: "high price of ebooks because they cost so much to store"

Wow. I've got a terrabyte backup drive where he could pay me to host his books if it costs all that much to have his own hardware. It would hold a LOT of ebooks. I can even charge him a small amount for the physical space the drive takes up on my desk (as compared to how much the physical space in a warehouse/store costs for dead tree books). I'll charge him half the cost he thought it would cost to host the same amount on whatever servers he's using :o)

Of course they don't mind paying for the storage to keep track of their customer's activities as they browse the web and whatever other private data they might be able to accumulate without permission :)

I guess to be fair, an eBook doesn't "wear out" so retailers would lose out on that small market. The device does though and often the supplier of the book is also the supplier of the device.

Andrea wrote: "I guess to be fair, an eBook doesn't "wear out" so retailers would lose out on that small market. ..."

On the flip side, you can't loan them to friends or leave them to your kids. Used to be if I read a book I really liked, I'd pass it on to a friend with the recommendation (it'd usually come back, eventually.) Likewise, friends would recommend a new book by handing it to me. Not possible with ebooks.


It's worth noting there are several publishers that don't use DRM (Amazon gives them that option), including Tor and Baen. That doesn't mean they give you permission to pass out free copies to your friends; rather, they trust you not to.


One reason that ebook prices are high is publishers still want to encourage physical books. You may recall back in 2013/2014 Amazon and Hachette had a dispute over ebook pricing. In the end, Hachette won, specifically the right to set the retail price of the ebooks (i.e., to prevent Amazon (or B&N) from discounting it. Amazon marks these in small type, "price set by seller.")* That really caused the growth of ebook sales to level off, and even drop a little.

The publishers want to keep ebook sales modest because Amazon has such a giant share of the ebook market (Amazon sells a lot of dead-tree books, too, but nowhere near the market share they have of ebooks.) The publishers are afraid if ebooks get too popular, they'll be totally dependent on Amazon.

*Ironically, it was Steve Jobs at Apple who convinced the big 6 publishers to demand control of retail ebook prices; Jobs didn't want the Apple's ebook store to have to compete on prices with Amazon. Apple and 5 of the big 6 had to settle price fixing charges with the US Justice Department, with Apple going to trial.

I remember getting a $57.00 check from that settlement. I used it to buy more books! (It's an addiction.)

G33z3r wrote: "The publishers want to keep ebook sales modest"

And yet instead of providing mass market paperbacks they are trade paperbacks that are more expensive and take up more space on a shelf. And I've seen authors complain that some of their books will never go out of hardcover because they'll jump straight to ebook. People would buy more dead tree books if they weren't forced to spend nearly double on a trade paperback for nearly the same amount of paper and ink, its just taller and skinnier than the mass market version, sometimes with larger font.

We don't buy new hardbacks or trade size paperbacks because they are heavy and take up too much space on the shelf. I'll sometimes get them secondhand. This house is full of books and we love getting out of print ones from rare book sellers through Amazons around the world.
Publishers keep the e-book price high because they don't want to wipe out the sales of their paperbacks.

This doesn't take independent publishers into account; we can publish easily and cheaply in e-book form.

Otherwise I haven't anything to add, but I like to keep reading such discussions to see what others are experiencing or what the news might be.

J.A. Konrath & Barry Eisler both used to be published by one of the Big Six publishers & ebooks allowed them to ditch them for self-publishing. IIRC, they said they could get their books to market a year earlier & made more money on them at $2.99 per book than they had when the books were 3 times as much through a publisher. They had some conversations about it & published them for free on Smashwords here:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...

Konrath also discusses it & gives tips to new authors on his web site & in his blog.
http://jakonrath.com/
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/

It makes sense to me that he & Eisler can do this since they have established names & know what they're doing. I think the trials of getting a book past a decent gatekeeper could do a lot of good for most authors, though. Finding & paying a good team for ARC reading & editing is tough. Marketing is even tougher since most authors have neither the experience or personality for it.

Unfortunately, most publishers seem to be pushing a lot of this work back on their authors. Their gatekeeping seems to be more of a crap shoot or a matter of having the right connections. Editing & proofing is awful for too many books. That's made GR a far better place to sort through the dross for me. I can see all the books & don't really care how it was published.

Thanks Jim.

You CAN loan Kindle books.

G33z3r wrote: "Microsoft's eBook service (did you know there was one?) shut down today. All the eBooks went >poof, de-rezed. (Refunds were offered to those who bought them, but not for the freebies.)

Just in ca..."

Me, too. :)

Add: Sorry, that was supposed to be a reply to Luffy's comment.

I believe you can loan a Kindle book once, to one person's e-reader. My books are set up to allow that and I think it's a good idea. This does depend on the other person having a Kindle or mobi app of course. And the book can't go around a circle of friends, not unless they loan the Kindle I suppose.

Bear in mind quite a lot of Kindle books do also come in paper form, though I don't make much royalty from those and it's not good for very long books. The paperbacks also carry an obligation for me to send copies to a dozen major college libraries in Ireland and UK. If someone likes an e-book enough, buying the print on demand paperback might seem a good investment.

I never knew Microsoft did e-books, but I have been warning friends never to buy a smart tv as they are brickable. Sony bricked all the Kobos over here, years ago. I've hefted one and they were heavy. Brick before and after.

I was told recently of a smart tv that did not work because while the house had electricity it had a broadband failure. So no internet or tv. Apparently teenagers can get quite shirty, who'd've thought?

We had a smart TV for a while, the first flat screen we got, but it was a PITA & died in just a few years. Actually, it died twice, but was covered by warranty the first time. It automatically updated its firmware one evening while we were watching it. Had to wait about 15 minutes until it finished, so I unplugged it from the Internet after that. We had no ability to set the update time. I have an old computer hooked up to it that works better than the smart features.

Given the track record of Facebook & other devices like Alexa, I don't want them around anyway. A guy at work started getting targeted ads on his home account after a conversation in his office. He had both Google & Facebook Messenger open on his phone. One of them had to be listening in. Definitely different days now.

Clare wrote: "I believe you can loan a Kindle book once, to one person's e-reader. My books are set up to allow that and I think it's a good idea...."

Yes, though as you say, it has to be authorized by the publisher. None of the big publishers do, (Eligible titles have "Lending: Enabled" on the Product Details section of their Amazon product page.) Most indie publishers, such as yourself, seem to allow it.

Clare wrote: "I never knew Microsoft did e-books,..."

Probably why they stopped trying. :)

Jim wrote: "We had a smart TV for a while, the first flat screen we got, but it was a PITA..."

In the old days, when I turned on the TV I had to wait for the filaments on the vacuum tubes to heat up before it could show a picture. (The same was once true of radios.) Then for a time we had instant-on TVs, which were almost instant-on. Now I have to wait for my "smart TV" to boot.

Jim says:
"A guy at work started getting targeted ads on his home account after a conversation in his office."

Not just personal confidentiality but business and client confidentiality are at stake. Why sign a non-disclosure agreement or an embargo if....

I wouldn't mind using something like Siri or Alexa as a toy, asking all kinds of weird questions just to see if you can get an interesting response.

But having it spy on my all the time? Nope. In fact just recently we had a conference call, and just as we finished deciding what we're going to do this female voice said something about "being glad to help you". It was one person's phone and not only was the timing perfect (we'd just finished, and she didn't even interrupt) but also creepy in that it was like she was mind-controlling us to get to our solution and thus "helped" us. :)

Good point that Clare made, that device wasn't just listening in to a personal convesation but it was work related, not that we discussed anything that would have much effect on the market (we were just figuring out what we needed to do that day to implement a new feature) but it could have been some confidential thing with a customer or some critical company plan!

Out of curiosity, how does Amazon deal with those free indie books? Obviously they can't be getting royalties on them, and I can't picture authors paying to have their book made available (or at least not enough for it to be worth much to Amazon), but I find it a bit of a stretch they are serving those books out of the goodness of their hearts :) Though maybe they hope that then customers buy other books by that author that do cost something (whether the same book in dead tree form, or a subsequent book in the series now that they are hooked).

Andrea says:
Out of curiosity, how does Amazon deal with those free indie books? Obviously they can't be getting royalties on them, and I can't picture authors paying to have their book made available (or at least not enough for it to be worth much to Amazon), but I find it a bit of a stretch they are serving those books out of the goodness of their hearts :)

Amazon started life as a bookstore, a long time ago even for me. The owner encouraged other bookstores to sell new, secondhand and rare books through his platform. Still does.
The owner then started using the platform for other purposes and after going public for investment opened up to sell just about everything. I remember at the time of the launch a friend saying that to justify the share trading price increase, Amazon would have to sell every book sold in the world. We didn't know yet about the everything, but someone sure did.

Amazon reinvested into the book business by opening Kindle (when e-ink was invented) and print on demand publishing to any author.
After some years the owner said he wanted a team to work on what development would potentially put Kindle books out of business, and start offering that in parallel. Thus instead of purchasing we may read as many e-books as we want in a month, if we choose to pay per month, and have the books vanish off the Kindle.

I am told Amazon does not make any money from its book sales, just breaks even. The store chooses to allow free books, provided they meet conditions like being permafree elsewhere or temporarily free as a marketing sample to encourage sales. This will be because the more readers who use Amazon, the more books they will sell overall.

A secondhand bookshop owner was asked in my hearing why he was opening another branch near a library, and he said, "That's where the readers are."

Just the other I was talking with people, and they were saying how some get ads based on conversations said within earshot of their phones.

from Andrea:
I am told Amazon does not make any money from its book sales, just breaks even. The store chooses to allow free books, provided they meet conditions like being permafree elsewhere or temporarily free as a marketing sample to encourage sales. This will be because the more readers who use Amazon, the more books they will sell overall.

Books/Kindle is a very profitable way for Amazon to get customers to buy other stuff. It's advertising in a way, but the difference is Amazon gets money out of it instead of paying for such advert.

Yes, Edmund, you log on to check a book and get offered summer dresses and car parts.

Audrey, re the phones, if you have a YouTube app on your phone (I don't), you have to give it permission to listen to your phone's microphone. Try deleting the app and reloading it, and this time look at the four permissions you have to tick. Or not tick.

Google which owns YouTube is busily listening to and recording people. They admit it, for their AIs to learn translation, speech patterns etc.

Re advertising, my husband Allan a couple of years ago tracked how if he Googled an item it would be offered to him within a couple of days by Amazon. Now it is offered to him within minutes. These firms all swap and sell your data. They might as well be one firm.

A football club / league in Spain was recently fined for tapping fans' phones via an app and making use of the information. They listened to a million people's phones and correlated their locations just a match was starting. The reason was to establish which bars were showing the match live without paying for the live tv broadcast.
The fine was not for spying on people, as I understand it, but for not giving the fans sufficient information about how the data would be used.

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/t...

https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/12/18...

https://www.the42.ie/la-liga-fined-ap...

" The league’s official app — which has been downloaded more than 10 million times and allows football fans to catch up on live scores, the latest news and match highlights — was found guilty of monitoring users’ locations and activating the phones’ microphones without their permission. "

Clare wrote: "...Try deleting the app and reloading it, and this time look at the four permissions you have to tick. Or not tick. ..."

I do watch that & it's amazing how often the app won't work if I don't give it everything it asks for, even when I'm sure it doesn't need it. When that happens, I uninstall the app.

The loss of privacy has been insidious & is rapidly getting worse. Typically programs will assure you that data you care to share is anonymized & used to help them tweak their systems. They'll tell you that's why they can offer you so much for free. You're a product that is helping them tweak their commercial systems. It might be true - probably is - at a glance, but it's complicated.

With enough anonymized data, individuals can be picked out very quickly & tracked accurately. There's a great example here:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...

Even worse, while your data might be anonymous on one site, cookies track you through the Internet. These little stalkers can pass along a lot of information to other sites that might not promise the same anonymity.
https://privacy.net/stop-cookies-trac...

I see examples of this fairly often as I work on computers & see targeted ads in their browsers or their browser history. Sometimes it's really clear they're planning a vacation to a particular place. Other times I've run into embarrassing things. We all try to ignore those, but it's been awkward.

AdBlock Plus.
Currently blocking three ads on this page.

Thanks Jim, that's an interesting article. The date of birth can hardly be considered vital for anonymised medical research, much better to break it up by decade or something.

Found this as another story on the same site, satellites that could build their own solar panels in space.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/...

Actually, the date can be very important since there can be changes to the environment or new drugs available that would lead to other avenues of research if there is a statistical anomaly. Any data is very much a two-edged sword & like any other powerful tool, it can be used for good or bad. I'm always in a quandary about it & it's a very messy subject when it comes to personal details.

That is awesome about the satellites building their own solar panels. I hadn't seen that story before.

I see your point, I would not make any more available than the year.

It isn't just FB & Google that listen to your phone. Here is a pretty good story about Apple contractors listening in to everything from drug deals to sex.
https://www.theguardian.com/technolog...

Errr... thanks, I think......

TMI? Note that Apple doesn't give you any option to opt-out of having your data used & their watch seems to be particularly keen on listening in. Not that it's easy to find the opt-out on a lot of systems nor do I always trust them, but at least there is some recourse by the watch groups when they step too far over the line.

I don't use Apple, except the college computers.

I don't either. I thought about going MAC back when Steve Trammiel killed the Atari computers, but I didn't want to get locked into another proprietary system that could be killed at the whim of an executive. Of course, the alternatives weren't all that great. Here's an old joke, still funny if you remember them.

If Operating Systems Were Airlines...

DOS: Passengers walk out onto the runway, grab hold of the plane, push until it glides, hop on, then jump off when it hits the ground. They grab the plane again...

Mac: The jet is bright, fast, & new. The flight attendants, staff, & pilots all look the same. You're told to board, but when you ask what the destination is, you're told you don't want to know & don't need to know. Sit back down & watch the movie.

Windows 95: Your shiny, fast jet takes off & you're enjoying the ride when it explodes without warning.

OS/2: There's a shiny jet parked in view. You're told how great the flight will be, but it's not quite ready yet. You wait, ask again, & are told the same thing again. You wait, ask again,...

Unix: Passengers bring a piece of the plane & a box of tools with them to the airport. They split into groups, build a bunch of different planes, & fly off in different directions.

Ha ha! Love it. I had not seen that one.
Yes, Windows used to crash or give us the blue screen of death in those days. Not now. Apple crashes now in my experience. Usually in the middle of making a film.

Jim wrote: "Windows 95: Your shiny, fast jet takes off & you're enjoying the ride when it explodes without warning."

They forgot to mention the lovely view of the "blue sky of death" you have before you plummet to the ground.

As I was reading the first few, in my head I was thinking "Unix will have to be something about building the plane yourself..." :)

I guess I didn't use DOS enough to get that joke, other than it being all text based I couldn't think of an analogy to the few times I had to use it.

This could easily be updated just by sticking with Windows, Mac, & Unix. Leave the version out of Windows & change it to crash rather than explode. I probably should have done that, but I was typing fast from memory.

I really get the DOS part, but it's not all bad. In order to network DOS computers, we used LANman, another program where we had to manually type commands to map drives & printers. A lot of those old 'net' commands are still available in the cmd window of even Windows 10. I use them all the time.

I still had OS/2 on one computer at my last job & it was still running when I left there 12+ years ago. They replaced it with a far more expensive system after I left since no one else knew how to use it.

Jim, my husband laughed at your joke, especially the OS2. He said it worked very well but IBM were so slow bringing it out, they lost the market and only the big banks took the system.