Back in April Microsoft suddenly decided to close their ebook store and take back all the ebooks they had sold while issuing customers refunds for all purchases.
Now Microsoft has put up a new support page that says the Microsoft Edge browser will no longer support ebooks with an .epub file extension.
Of course older versions of Edge will still support ePub ebooks but the feature is expected to get removed with an upcoming update, likely when they decide to switch to the new Chromium-based Edge browser.
As an alternative, they advise downloading an app from the Windows store that supports ePub.
The support page also notes that Microsoft has partnered with the DAISY Consortium to provide some additional apps in the future with accessibility features built-in, some of which are expected to be available in the Microsoft Store after September.
If you’ve been using the Edge web browser to read ePub ebooks now’s a good time to switch to something else before ePub support gets removed for good.
via: MSPoweruser
cc says
Microsoft surveyed all of its customers who were reading epubs on Edge, and both of them were OK with the change…
Karen says
Ha, exactly. Who wants to read books in a browser? And I dumped MS Edge the minute I turned on my newest laptop.
Benjamin says
While I find this understandable, it was still a nice feature to have, especially if I wanted/needed to read for a bit on a computer that wasn’t mine. That didn’t happen often, but it did happen, and having the capability by default will be missed.
Robert says
time to downgrade back to windows 7 or windows 8, no reason to use the forced windows 10 anymore, they keep on bunching windows 10 features, so why the FFF should I not switch to Linux over this crap I liked using edge with epub for text to speech option for that very reason I will be downgrading the Windows 10 back to a early version even if I have to force it.
Jay says
Funnily enough I just tried out using Edge for epub a few months ago and really enjoyed the experience. Will be sad to see it go
Effendi Rukman says
Definitely annoyed they removed this feature, as for the comment who wants to read books in a browser, many do since its convenient to download and read it off the internet in one place. Honestly for those who used the feature it will definitely be missed and I don’t really see why windows needed to remove it, they definitely didn’t survey people.