Do you have any ebooks from Microsoft? No, you don't.

[robkelk]

This weekend you better read those ebooks you bought from Microsoft – because they'll be dead come next week

If you bought an ebook through Microsoft's online store, now's the time to give it a read, or reread, because it will stop working early July.

That's right, the books you paid for will be literally removed from your electronic bookshelf because, um, Microsoft decided in April it no longer wanted to sell books. It will turn off the servers that check whether your copy was bought legitimately – using the usual anti-piracy digital-rights-management (DRM) tech – and that means your book can't be verified as being in the hands of its purchaser, and so won't be displayed.

Even the free-to-download ebooks will fail.

So go read your those Microsoft ebooks you have, while you still can. This thead will still be here when you get back.

You would imagine that Microsoft considered other options: figuring out how to remove the need for DRM validation for those books; seeing if it could provide a non-DRM version; selling its database of DRM books to another company; or keeping a skeleton DRM system in place.

The fact that it decided against all these options and to simply kill the whole thing off should be a very big warning sign to anyone who has bought, considered buying, or will consider buying an ebook in the future.

The truth is that most ebooks come with some degree of DRM. Amazon and its Kindle ebooks are the biggest in the market – nearly all of them come with Amazon's DRM system.

Here's a source that makes clear what does and doesn't have DRM, and does not charge for its public-domain books without DRM: The Internet Archive. (Yes, the site is more than just the Wayback Machine. They have public-domain movies, too.)