Microsoft drops Reader after Amazon, Apple take over
Microsoft Reader to shutter August 30 2012 — Microsoft on Monday quietly said it would end its Reader app within a year. Stores carrying the LIT format will pull the format on November 8 of this year, while the app would no longer …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second death of Microsoft Reader, which TechFlash reported had been 'back from dead' in September 2009 after years of neglect — that revival lasted barely two years before Monday's announcement gave it a hard end date. The timing tracks with Microsoft's own annual report, filed the same month, naming Apple and Google as its principal rivals while conceding nothing about its own consumer reading ambitions.
The mechanics matter more than the headline: stores stop selling LIT titles on November 8 of this year, and the app itself goes dark on August 30, 2012 — a one-year runway for a format Microsoft introduced back in 2000. The confirmed framing is capitulation, not strategy: Amazon and Apple now own the e-book storefronts, and Microsoft is exiting rather than competing.
First-order effects
- LIT buyers lose the ability to purchase new titles when stores pull the format on November 8, and any books tied to the Reader app become unreadable after the August 30, 2012 shutdown.
- Microsoft formally cedes the e-book market it helped pioneer to Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iBooks ecosystems, removing Reader from its consumer software lineup entirely.
Second-order effects
- Publishers and distributors still maintaining LIT catalogs are forced onto migration paths toward EPUB or proprietary Kindle/iBooks formats, concentrating catalog work — and DRM relationships — around the two surviving platforms.
- Any hardware or partner plans built on the assumption of a Microsoft reading client lose their software foundation, narrowing the field of credible third e-book platforms to essentially none.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, e-book retail consolidates fully into closed device-tied ecosystems, with orphaned-format migrations like this one becoming the recurring cost consumers pay for backing a losing DRM standard.
- For Microsoft, the exit fits a broader retrenchment toward the enterprise-and-platform battles it explicitly frames against Apple and Google in its filings, rather than defending every legacy consumer franchise.
The trend: E-book distribution is consolidating into a small set of closed, device-tied ecosystems run by Amazon and Apple, with older DRM formats like LIT being sunset rather than migrated.