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.