[tomsem]

Apologies if this has been pointed out before, but this seems to be mostly about retiring MOBI and KF8 and fully transitioning to the various flavors of KFX, so they can shut down the services that provide it.

It can be painful and expensive to maintain legacy services, which nobody wants to do in the first place, and at some point, entirely infeasible: the last person who knew anything about it retires or leaves the company, and it's hard to find someone to step in and figure it out. Who will even want to do it, and who's going to train them?

So it's probably more about mitigating engineering risks than anything else. For all we know they are facing the scenario I outline above.

If it happens to close DRM loopholes it's not as if they are going to intentionally open others going forward. And it's going to hurt them a bit when it's fully shut down, because people like some of us will start buying ebooks somewhere else. But not so much.

Some of you might remember that Adobe released unlicensed versions of (I think) Creative Suite 2, that anyone could download and use. I was working on the licensing team at the time. The key service was running on Windows 2000 Server or something and it was tied to certain unique hardware IDs of that specific machine, and it was no longer feasible to provide updates to the software and be able to switch to a different key server. So if it died (as was inevitable), people weren't going to be able to migrate the license to a new system. So it was proactively retired and the only nice thing to do was to make the software freely available.