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Comment by GorgeRonde | Hacker News Reader

Bought a book on GooglePlay once. Wanted to download it as an ePub. ePub wasn't available due to a technical error on Google's side (apparently affecting all epubs). Had to use Adobe Digital Editions to "download" it only to figure out the download wasn't available. + DRMs (i.e. can't read the ebook on a smartphone).

Went to libgen instead, will never buy a book on GooglePlay again.

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I begrudgingly bought an ebook from google once. I knew there was DRM, but the store page said I could read it in my browser.

google-chrome != browser

grrrrr

Same. Except I didn't know about Libgen so I spun up a windows vm and installed some dubious software to extract the epub.

How long did the ePub error last?

Seems like it is gone now (you still have to juggle with DRMs though). However when it happened I searched for the error code and found some posts on Google forums. They were 6 months to 1 year old, with no provided solution.

When did this happen? Maybe it affected limited number of users. I use google play books all the time and this was never an issue for me.

Here we are in the "age of information" and there is still no way to distinguish between the shill and/or troll and the genuine information provider. Glorious.

This age of electronics and logic and AI should have been able to provide a reasonable benefit to consumers at the very bottom. Instead, corporations have found new ways to rig things, impersonate people, and generally be dishonest about the quality and effectiveness of their offerings.

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