★ Audiobooks and DRM

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.

Cory Doctorow on the Amazon Kindle’s Text-to-Speech Feature

First off, this art­icle by sci­ence fic­tion author Cory Doctorow¹ in the Guardian shouldn’t be called ‘Authors have lost the plot in Amazon Kindle battle’. Pressure is com­ing from the Authors’ Guild and from pub­lish­ers. Both might claim to rep­res­ent authors, but whether they do or not is debatable.

Now, I hap­pen to dis­agree with that pos­i­tion because I don’t think that text-to-speech is a sub­sti­tute for audiobooks for the major­ity of listen­ers, and because the value of text-to-speech is such that people will buy enough ebooks to off­set any losses from sub­sti­tu­tion, and, most import­antly, authors who oppose this fea­ture look like grasp­ing, greedy jerks and will ali­en­ate their readers.

Quite apart from the infringe­ment of audiobook rights, there an access­ib­il­ity issue. Plenty of read­ers who are par­tially sighted or have dif­fi­culty read­ing will bene­fit hugely from hav­ing the text spoken aloud. This tech­no­logy has the poten­tial to bring books to a wider mar­ket. Meanwhile, those with a ves­ted interest are con­tent to arse around like mid-1990s record com­pany exec­ut­ives and the RIAA.

► Cory Doctorow: Authors have lost the plot in Amazon Kindle battle | Technology | guardian.co.uk

★ Recording the Novel, Word by Fricking Word

It is my Web 2.0 dream to cre­ate a real-time rep­res­ent­a­tion of writ­ing a novel¹. I’d like a video, per­haps, that shows the let­ters appear­ing and dis­ap­pear­ing. The tap of a stone mason’s ham­mer could accom­pany each new let­ter; a squeaky sound a dele­tion. Once the novel is rep­res­en­ted in this way, the film could be speeded up. Imagine a novel tak­ing form like a house, brick by brick. Read more →