Microsoft:

Starting April 2, 2019, the books category in Microsoft Store will be closing. Unfortunately, this means that starting July 2019 your ebooks will no longer be available to read, but you’ll get a full refund for all book purchases. See below for details.

While you can no longer purchase or acquire additional books from the Microsoft Store, you can continue to read your books until July 2019 when refunds will be processed.

Nothing but props for the way Microsoft is handling this. What more could you possibly want them to do? They can’t compete with Amazon and Apple and they’ve turned out the lights. And given folks their money back, to boot.

But this does remind me that we own less and less as consumers. More and more, we license our music, rather than own MP3s, discs and LPs. No more daily papers, no more loaded bookshelves full of favorites we loan to friends.

No more fully working copies of Photoshop, Illustrator, Word, or Excel. It’s all licensed goods.

Not that this is even remotely likely, if Adobe went out of business, you’d lose access to Creative Cloud. If Microsoft went under, you’d lose access to Office 365.

Imagine if Tesla went under. Would the software in your car continue to work? Probably. But no more updates. And that self driving mode? Without updates? That’d be scary.

Don’t mean to be a curmudgeon here. But Microsoft just took their books back.