The Travelin' Librarian

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.

About Michael

Michael Sauers is currently the Technology Innovation Librarian for the Nebraska Library Commission in Lincoln, Nebraska and has been training librarians in technology for more than 15 years. He has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller. He earned his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael’s tenth book, Blogging & RSS: A Librarian’s Guide, Second Edition was published October 2010 with three more books to be published in 2012. He has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs Web sites for authors and historical societies, takes many, many photos, and reads more than 100 books a year.

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