Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
I agree with you 100% about piracy. It is a point I have made many times. What is amazing about e-book publishing is that a profitable market still exists despite the ease of obtaining pirate copies.
However, I expect that many of these honest people would not regard keeping these books as being dishonest. Interesting but not strictly relevant is the question of who bears the costs. I imagine it would be Microsoft. I somehow doubt that publishers and authors, having been paid by Microsoft for these books, are going to refund any amounts to Microsoft. If this is the case, we have the situation where the Author/Publisher has been paid for a license which cannot be used. The reason why the book will not be available is not so much because of the license but because Microsoft chose to lock its e-books to the Edge browser with DRM, and is no longer prepared to maintain its licence infrastructure. Some authors/publishers may be in for a windfall. I'm not privy to the legal arrangements but one possibility is that the licenses purchased from Microsoft remain in force but of course cannot be used.
The question is moot in any event because the DRM scheme used has not been circumvented.
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Also because MS is switching Edge from its proprietary code base to the Chromium code base. Now that browsers are no longer the center of gravity of the internet there is no competitive Advantage in an optimized proprietary code base. And odds are the Edge DRM depends on the inhouse codebase. It's probably more trouble than it's worth to try to graft the edge ebook object store to Chromium.
Bexides, I can't think of a single app-locked ebook ecosystem that has been cracked.
Not because it might be impossible but because none succeeded enough to be relevant.