Library Journal article of DRM and audiobooks

DRM-free Audiobooks on the Rise

With DRM-free audiobooks continuing to make inroads into the retail market and scheduled shortly to trickle into the library arena, several panels at BookExpo America (BEA) and the Audio Publishers Association Conference (APAC) (both in late May) centered on the issue of digital rights management (DRM).

DRM has been the talk of the audiobook industry since late 2007, when eMusic launched the first-ever audiobook catalog (now offering some 2500 titles) in the universally compatible MP3 format. After months of testing DRM-free audiobook downloads on eMusic, Random House
Audio determined through a digital watermark experiment that all instances of piracy came not from the DRM-free editions but from DRM-protected editions that had been hacked and ripped from CDs. And so it, too, announced that it would, through eMusic, be selling mostly DRM-free downloadable audiobooks (some ten percent of the publisher’s authors, Christopher Paolini among them, continue to hold out).

What about libraries?

However, eMusic and Random House have so far been focusing their DRM-free efforts strictly on the consumer market, leaving the library market to Playaway and OverDrive. (For fuller coverage of audiobooks in libraries, see LJ, May 15, “Audio Fixation.”)

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Rattling Books presently presents audio titles as either an audio or mp3 CD depending on duration (short titles are manufactured as audio cds, long titles as mp3 cds) and all titles are also available from rattlingbooks.com as DRM-free mp3 downloads.

Rattling Books are also available as Library Downloads through Overdrive.com.