Random House Audio has announced that “it will now allow its audiobooks to be sold without DRM by all of its online retailers.” (from Boing Boing)
Random House Audio provides downloadable audio to popular Random House print titles, as well as titles from other publishing houses. Their audio is available through iTunes, Audible and eMusic.
“In the announcement, Random House notes that they’ve been running a DRM-free audiobook program with eMusic for months, and that none of the pirate editions of their audiobooks online came from those DRM-free editions; rather, they’ve come from DRM’ed editions that were cracked, and from ripped CDs.” (from Boing Boing)
If other publishers of downloadable audio follow suit, they should find that a whole new audience will be taking advantage of their services – for one, public libraries who have been loathe to having to choose between iPod and MP3 formats.
It will be interesting to see where things go from here.
Feed
March 4, 2008 at 07:45
That’s an interesting quote from Random House about the DRM-free editions are not being used as pirate copies. It goes against the traditional view from the music companies that providing DRM-free versions will create more pirate copies.
The issue of DRM is an interesting one, and also one filled with a lot of twists and turns. I recently read an article in Wired magazine (“The Angry Mogul,” issue 15.12).
One of the suggestions made by the article was that the recent “change of heart” by the big music companies isn’t about removing DRM to help make the users lives easier, it’s about trying to break the stranglehold that Apple has with their iPod and iTunes music stores.
Perhaps there is some of the same motivation in this announcement from Random House.
March 4, 2008 at 07:54
Yes, I found that most interesting too – that piracy is not reliant on DRM. As for the motive behind the change, I am not too concerned about what it is, as long as it results in content that can be accessed cross platform, to enable us to better serve all our users.
March 4, 2008 at 08:47
My view of this type of discussion is that the content providers have used DRM in a scenario similar to “guilty until proven innocent” rather than “innocent until proven guilty”.
In my view, perhaps a naive one, most people just want to be able to use the content on their chosen platform, and not share the files with everyone.
One other interesting thought occurred to me after reading the article as well. The article indicated that DRM isn’t gone for good. There was a suggestion that DRM free music was being used to break the Apple/iPod/iTunes, monopoly but that DRM is still in the minds of the music companies.
My hope is that DRM is gone for good, but it will be an issue worth watching closely.
March 11, 2008 at 07:43
According to this post on the LibrarianInBlack website Penguin is also going to start offering audio books DRM free.