★ Audiobooks and DRM

Posted by on Dec 13, 2009 in publishing

For those of you who don’t know — and there’s no reason, per­haps, that you should — DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, and it is a tech­no­logy by which con­tent dis­trib­ut­ors (record com­pan­ies, for the most part) attempt to con­trol how a cus­tomer exper­i­ences their product.

Now, audiobooks.

The start­ing pis­tol for Internet-distributed audiobooks has been fired and Audible.com is at the ‘b’ of the bang. They have a huge selec­tion of titles read by great act­ors and if you go for one of their monthly plans, like I do, you can enjoy two books per month for very little cash. Top drawer.

The trouble? Audible’s titles are DRM’d. That is, they are locked down tight. Countless are the times I’ve said to a friend of mine, ‘Oh, you’d love this book I’m listen­ing to…’ and then trail off because I know I won’t be able to lend it. The DRM means only a few machines I’ve nom­in­ated can play­back the audio.

Well, this stinks. That much is obvi­ous. But you’d think that Audible are doing this because of the pres­sures put upon them by pub­lish­ers. It turns out that this is not neces­sar­ily the case. In an art­icle for Publisher’s Weekly art­icle, Cory Doctorow (whose book Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, I review here) relates the saga of try­ing to get (i) his pub­lisher, then (ii) Audible, then (iii) the online Apple iTunes store to offer his new book without DRM. Thus far, he’s only man­aged to con­vince the first two.

Audiobooks are fant­astic. They are unabridged, high-quality record­ings of stor­ies that you can enjoy when you’re out walk­ing, doing the dishes, or work­ing out. If Steve Jobs — and there­fore Apple — is ser­i­ous about his atti­tude towards DRM, he should make sure the online Apple store sup­ports pure, unfiddled-with MP3s for both music and the spoken word.

I’m pretty sure this is what read­ers want. It’s what I want.

As a coda, you can down­load an audiobook of the first edi­tion of Déjà Vu here — for £500.

H’only jok­ing! It is, of course, free as in air.

  • http://twitter.com/by_tor by_tor

    So what is Apple’s stated reas­on­ing for con­tinu­ing to demand DRM on audiobooks? I mean they ditched it for music. I always thought it was Audible that was the stick­ing point.

  • http://ianhocking.pip.verisignlabs.com/ Ian Hocking

    Yes, that’s what I thought, and that’s what makes this so sur­pris­ing. It sounds to me like the mech­an­ism they have in place just pre­sup­poses the exist­ence of a DRM policy and they don’t have a work­flow altern­at­ive that lacks it.

  • http://twitter.com/by_tor by_tor

    I was not much of a fan of audiobooks up until recently. I often felt the nar­rator didn’t fit “my vis­ion” of what the char­ac­ters should sound like and that sort of spoilt it for me. Stephen Fry doing H Potter was an excep­tion and maybe I was just unlucky because recently I’ve been listen­ing to the abridged ver­sion of Iain Banks’ Transition read by Peter Kenny. It’s avail­able as a free non-DRM pod­cast at iTunes Store, and it’s really a great listen. The story is good, and the nar­ra­tion superb. If stand­ard audiobooks were like this (I mean unen­cumbered by DRM, and great qual­ity) I would cer­tainly buy a lot more.

  • http://ianhocking.pip.verisignlabs.com/ Ian Hocking

    I have to say that while the nar­ra­tion of Transition was very good, I was under­whelmed by the book itself. It seemed rather rushed.

    I was really look­ing for­ward to an Audiobook of Wordsworth’s poetry — until I listened to the nar­rator. He sounds like an American put­ting on a camp English accent. In that case, though, I gave Audible a phone call and they let me send the book back, vir­tu­ally, which was nice.