Today Microsoft announced that they will be closing their ebook store for good as of April 2nd, 2019.
Considering how unpopular it was that’s not surprising, but what is surprising is the fact that they’ve decided to delete all ebooks from user accounts and issue refunds for past purchases and pre-orders.
It sounds like another fake April Fools’ story but sadly it’s not.
Microsoft has decided that they want out of the ebook business so bad that they’re going to remove everything from their servers and refund all past ebook purchases.
That’s probably not as bad as it sounds considering most people didn’t even know that Microsoft sold ebooks.
But for anyone that has gotten ebooks from the Microsoft Store, both free and paid, they will be getting deleted from user accounts in July 2019.
Microsoft will be offering full refunds for these disappearing books so it’s not as bad as it sounds, but it’s certainly an unprofessional way to conduct business and yet another bad look for Microsoft.
According to this Books in Microsoft Store: FAQ, refunds will start rolling out in early July. They will automatically refund ebook purchases to the original payment method, and if that’s no longer valid they will issue a store credit for the Microsoft Store.
Microsoft will also be offering an additional $25 credit to people that had any annotations added to their purchased ebooks for the inconvenience of losing their notes.
It’s been proven yet again that companies can’t just put out a half-assed ebook store with yet another ridiculous DRM scheme that severely limits how people can read their purchased ebooks and expect to rake in money. Even giants like Microsoft can’t pull that off.
What’s most frustrating about Microsoft is they are this huge company who keeps getting into new endeavours (this ebook business, it’s music Groove thing, windows phone, anyone?) And when it doesn’t work out for them, they just completely bail and stop supporting it at all. Even to a lesser degree Xbox, where they don’t invest into first party games like Sony – the most they do it pay off companies to get a timed exclusive. I had a windows phone and it eventually couldn’t even properly access web pages due to lack of support. I didn’t buy any microsoft ebooks, but for those that did, this is frustrating.
Wow! I’m impressed. When eReader shut down I lost the ability to read thousands of dollars worth of books. I admire Microsoft for doing refunds.
I didn’t even know they did eBooks until this very minute. Wowzers.
If this is “unprofessional”, what will be then?
I must have missed the prior notice they were supposed to give me regarding my book purchases. Disgusting that they took my books away from me and didn’t even give me the option of downloading them. I found out by searching “ebooks” “refunding” “Microsoft” as soon as I started seeing random refunds. Better yet, I got a two step verification code which was generated right before a recent email notifying me I’d been refunded for another book. I was like, “what the heck is going on here? This is insane.”