Audio Book News: 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).