I posted earlier this week about DRM-free free eBooks. Now it looks like Random House is going through with DRM-free (though not $$$ free) digital audiobooks. It seems they’ve been doing this for a while through eMusic but will be extending it to all other online services (such as Audible and Overdrive I assume.) The most interesting part was this reason given for going through with the change:
[W]e have not yet found a single instance of the eMusic watermarked titles being distributed illegally. We did find many copies of audiobook files available for free, but they did not originate from the eMusic test, but rather from copied CDs or from files whose DRM was hacked.
In other words, people that legally purchased the music and could do what they wanted with it due to the lack of DRM felt no need to redistribute said content in legally questionable ways. Yep. Give us something we can actually use the way we want and we’ll pay for it. Don’t make us pay for something that locks us out of what we’ve paid for.
More at Boing Boing.
Well, it’s NLCL2 time again folks and this is the first blog-based assignment. Thing #3 has us creating a blog and writing some posts. Well, I’ve got the blog already and I don’t seem to have any problems coming up with topics lately. However, as part of the assignment we’re supposed to blog about the 7 and 1/2 lifelong learning habits and "which one might be easiest for you and hardest for you & why?"
This is a hard one for me. I just skimmed through the list again and honestly, I don’t find any of them difficult. My guess is that this is because it’s my job to constantly learn new things and that I’m a trainer so I’m constantly teaching others. This does put me in a unique situation compared to many others on our staff but I know I’m not totally alone.
As for what’s easiest, habit 7.5 most definitely: play. In some ways though this makes separating my work life from my non-work life somewhat difficult. I’m allowed to play at the office and many things I play with outside of work have job-related outcomes. I’m not complaining, I just have to force myself to separate some times.
Honestly, after my conversation with Cory about the project I was hoping this would happen. There is now a BoingBoing.net post about the Creative Commons project I’ve been working on at the Commission. As a result the story has also been picked up by LISNews. (I’m now off to give a heads-up to our computer team about the potential spike in Web traffic.)
I braved 20 degree weather and a wind chill in the single digits last night to get some shots of last night’s lunar eclipse. Here’s the one that I think came out the best. A set of the best 15 can be found on flickr.
But at least I know I was right…
Wilson also suggested that consumers would really have been better off with the HD format than with Blu-ray. [emphasis added]
"Storage capacity is the one area [where Blu-ray] can claim an advantage," he elaborated. But the outcome of the format war, which became official on Tuesday, "doesn’t benefit anyone today and it comes at a cost. [Blu-ray] discs and players are both more expensive to manufacture. The DVD format was less expensive to implement and further along in its deployment. [Blu-ray] is twelve months behind in terms of its feature set."
Via BetaNews: Analysts: Studios will gain from HD DVD’s exit, but consumers’ won’t
