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Audio Books Moving Away from DRM
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You trust what Jobs says???
Why???
He has a record of not always stating the truth and is hard to say when he saying a lie. Latest one was the use of Time Machine with AEBS, After Jobs announce it at the conference, they just removed it from the site with zero retraction and a lot of you got buned.
Yes, Lie, you can call it something else but ot me there is truth and lies. One can always say I dont know or I can not answer that.
Sorry about the consecutive posts, I figure someone would have commented in between.
It did, although IIRC, Baen released e-books, text files and HTML files of its popular authors for free, and not MP3s or audiobook materials. David Weber points out that a lot of folks wound up buying his books after reading them online or via ebook because they wanted to "support the author" and/or they still liked having the physical book. I'm not sure this necessarily holds true for audiobooks, since "having" the book is the same is having the recording. At least from my own experience, which is generally going to the library, getting the CDs, ripping them and listening to them on my iPod, after I've "read" the book this way I'm generally disinclined to buy a physical copy. Though I also usually wind up deleting the audio files as well, and not sending them out to the world on BitTorrent, either.
Still though, a move in the right direction, since most folks know that even DRM-free files are still watermarked with identifying information that, at least to me, would discourage file-sharing. The great upside though is not having to cope with having the "right" media player for the files, insomuch as iTunes/iPod is the only "right" player for FairPlay, for example.
No DRM is good news. But mp3? Wouldn't AAC be better since you can bookmark files? Do mp3s have any support for bookmarking like AAC?
Never. They just don't sell.
Sure. But people buy over a billion cell phones per year. No book tablet has sold well at all.
Never. They just don't sell.
Sure. But people buy over a billion cell phones per year. No book tablet has sold well at all.
i heard recently a talk from paulo coelho. he said after he put his book unprotected on the web his booksales went up. when his puplisher didn't want the books online he put them simply on bit torrent networks and his sales still went up. he gave this talk in public on a media conference with his publisher there and he didn't give a sh@#.
he's sold way over 100 million books. so he knows what he's talking about.
he's sold way over 100 million books. so he knows what he's talking about.
According to Jobs, nobody reads anymore either. I guess they should stop writing books all together then. Last time I checked, the Kindle has been sold out since before Xmas and that was at $400.
DRM is nothing more than annoying and if anything encourages people to share so they don't have to deal with restrictions.
Why would they do this? Doesn't seem to be a big enough market...people don't read anymore...haven't you heard.
Being serious..I can see Apple, Amazon, or a 3rd part developer write an app to make the iPhone compatible with the Kindle service...but a brand new device...I doubt it. Wait, no wait...you're write...there will be a new reader from Apple...It's called the MacBook Air.
Again, being serious...do you think there is a big enough market for it? People who will hold an electronic device in front of them for hours on end straining to read a monochrome book on screen? Why not just get the audio book?
Sold out...it's a marketing ploy by Amazon. Either that or they only made like 20 of them. Do you know anyone who has one? Neither do I.
"Sold out" is meaningless without real numbers. It may just mean that they are manufacturing very few since they have low expectations for sales. Or that they are having manufacturing problems. Find some real sales figures and we'll talk.
Audible rocks! But weren't they just bought by Amazon? Wonder how that will affect their stance. Perhaps Kindle 2.0 will support audio?
Speaking of the Kindle...anyone know where they came up with that name? Makes me think of Kindling, which of course is stuff you burn.
Well kindle means to inspire, so I guess in Amazon's product it means inspire to read.
Maybe they own a DRM company?
Or maybe they just want to be different!
DRM free audio books sounds great to me, I use rockbox on my ipod so it's the only way I could have any.
My local library just recently got rid of all their CD audiobooks and went to a more protected, CD-less audio player called, "playaway". The MP3 player, content and headphones are built into one package.
http://www.playawaylibrary.com/
Kind of a smackdown when others seem to be lightening up on DRM. Plus, I don't want to have a bulky (imagine Kindle-ala-KMart) player/headphones to hang onto while listening. And can you imagine sharing ear buds with other literary patrons? Ewww!
http://www.playawaylibrary.com/
Kind of a smackdown when others seem to be lightening up on DRM. Plus, I don't want to have a bulky (imagine Kindle-ala-KMart) player/headphones to hang onto while listening. And can you imagine sharing ear buds with other literary patrons? Ewww!
Coelho is cool, former Sony big man turned "fictional visionary" genre creator. Free podcasts like from Hayhouseradio.com only improve sales of their products.
Without DRM that means you can actually BUY audiobooks through download for the first time.
Hopefully the same will happen for video and games soon too. I'm not interested in extended rentals, and I think the PC game market is getting clobbered by so many games using atrocious DRM (I waited years for Bioshock, and then couldn't buy it because of the ludicrous "activation" it has).
Hopefully the same will happen for video and games soon too. I'm not interested in extended rentals, and I think the PC game market is getting clobbered by so many games using atrocious DRM (I waited years for Bioshock, and then couldn't buy it because of the ludicrous "activation" it has).
Hopefully this trend towards getting rid of DRM will make it more common in music and bring music from all of the record companies onto iTunes Plus.
and iTunes Plus in turn brings on the need for larger iPods, it's genius! </plug for choice of bitrate on iT+ songs>
DRM doesn't work?
Shocking!
It works by preventing Mac users from buying audiobooks! Graphic Audio, Books in Motion, and most public libraries provide their content in DRM formats that can't be read by iTunes. I'd love to buy books from Graphic Audio, but I'm not paying a premium for MP3 CDs when all I need is a downloaded file!
I predict a Golden Age for audiobook publishing if they follow through with removing DRM.
...Being serious..I can see Apple, Amazon, or a 3rd part developer write an app to make the iPhone compatible with the Kindle service...but a brand new device...I doubt it. Wait, no wait...you're write...there will be a new reader from Apple...It's called the MacBook Air.
Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but the MBA is way more than a PDF reader, it's also a giant iPod!
Hey, don't laugh. That's really what the apple salesman told me the other day at the store!