Audiobooks are a gigantic boost to circulation, and having them in a format that’s easy to access is vital.

CD Audiobooks for anything longer than a novella is kind of ridiculous and extremely costly. Longer books can run 20-30 cds, any one of which, if scratched or marred, means the whole thing has to be replaced. Publishers have dragged their feet in putting out MP3 cds, and even when they do the cost of purchase is often the same as a regular cd.

And let us not speak of cassettes. At this point, handing a cassette to a teenager or young adult patron is like offering thema wax cylinder.

Librarians want you to be able to get the book you want, in the format you desire. And this isn’t just preference, it’s also a matter of equal access for the visually impaired and people with learning differences like dyslexia. DRM protects companies who have already made a profit from making an additional profit and or pumping our cruddy malware to support their borked product.

DRM has no Right @ your library

You’re repeating yourself. If you have anything new to add, feel free.

Making a copy is not the same as theft. When I make a copy, no one has lost anything. To steal from a local bookstore is very different.

I think artists and others in the industry should be supported. And I do support them. But I’m a poor grad-student. De facto, the industry hacks would have the poor denied access to music, etc. I’m not copying stuff that I would have paid for, had the copy not been available. I copy stuff I otherwise simply would not have. No one is made less by. I am made more.

Publishers need to make money to stay in business

Why?

We don’t need publishers anymore. Artists, authors and musicians are able to sell directly to the public, and so the need for a publisher is diminishing. Admittedly this hasn’t really taken off quite yet, but it will only grow more and more as more of the world gets connected.

Publishers, recording companies, movie distributors, news media. They are all in the same boat. The traditional artist->publisher->consumer chain is breaking down and it has them running scared. This is why we see the sudden upsurge in copyright awareness, with bills like the UK’s digital economy bill and the US’s ACTA being brought in to appease big government donors rather than to actually let the technology and culture grow naturally. Culture and creativity is noth something that can be commodified anymore, and the publishers just can’t accept it.

This will be their downfall. let them die, we don’t need them anymore.

1. Library Editions on CD cost more, but from most publishers come with free replacement of CD’s for a limited time or lifetime of the product (in fact one company even replaces the cases for life as well)

2. The MP3 CD is DRM free works with darn near everything and is quite easy to use. Also it tends to be cheaper than a digital download or conventional CD based audiobook.
Take Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls
http://library.brillianceaudio.com/product.asp?AuthorId=1345&Titleid=25937
Library CD is $92.97 while the MP3 CD is $39.97
The MP3 CD is less than half the price

Yea, DRM sucks but I don’t think it’s going to be going away from overdrive anytime soon.

The model for this sort of thing allows the vendor/publisher to “sell” (in the most limited instance) a _single_ electronic “book” licence (at probably more than a physical book price) to your local cash poor Library.

The Library then have to submit to DRM to avoid getting burned by copyright laws (and publishers) by only allowing _one_ “copy” of it to be used by _one_ person at _one_ time.

Sorta defeats the purpose of electronic copies doesn’t it? and hinders any “universal” access to information.

Well at least the Libraries are trying to get new formats out there free to the public. I just worry that the provision of free, authoritative, and culturally important works will turn into pay-per-view if we don’t support the public libraries.

DRM is broken anyway – anyone with any nous can “keep” their copy.

So trying to compare virtual media with physical media is a complete non-starter from both sides of the DRM argument. On the pro-DRM side, you argue that you need DRM to protect your intellectual property and any attempt to make a profit from it because virtual media can be easily copied otherwise. On the anti-DRM side saying that a book “just works” vs. the pains of using DRM protected media is a an apples to oranges comparison.

Forgetting about DRM, the real issue is that the behavior of the end users MUST be controlled in order to ensure that the media publishers are financially compensated and continue to exist. People like Nine Inch Nails have taken different approaches of directly publishing to their customer base. But Trent Reznor is someone who has the resources to do that. Stephen King also did something similar at one point to great fanfare. But he has the resources that many other authors don’t have. For those who have something worth selling but lack the resources for publicity and distribution, the publishing houses are their only choice.

Not many people want to go into the business of self-publishing. It’s too much of a pain for most. Especially for truly creative people. Creativity, technical and business savvy are rarely evenly balanced skills in one individual. Since successful self-publishing for profit is limited to only a few rare sorts of individuals, that leads right back to the big publishing houses. Which, in the end still requires some form of control over the customers who purchase the virtual media. Then complicate it by throwing in libraries who let people borrow things for free and you have layers of problems to manage. DRM *IS* broken. But the answer is not to eliminate it. I predict that the music business will suffer tremendous losses as some shift away from DRM. In the long run, the only working solution will be one where the customer has a vested interest in NOT sharing. I don’t know how that can be achieved.

Its not the sense of entitlement that makes society want things for free; the sense of entitlement you speak of makes people think they have the right to what they desire immediately, without waiting. Part of it is the fast food culture we live in, and the internet helps feed that need for immediacy, and this all helps reinforce daily that we shouldn’t have to wait for anything (think of Veruca Salt’s cries I want it now!).

The whole idea behind public libraries is the providing of information to the masses, an old idea that stretches into antiquity, but in my opinion has yet to be completely adapted to modern technology. Denying access to some of that knowledge is ludicrous; technology should not be a barrier to knowledge, it should be a bridge.

In the case of owning a copy of an audio book, the right thing is to pay for it. You don’t pay for it, you don’t get to own a copy. Plain and simple. In the case of borrowing one from the library, it’s more complicated. You need a mechanism to prevent the user from having the copy beyond a limited period of time. Because if you don’t, then the library becomes nothing more than another channel for piracy, which is not right.

Let’s just imagine a world that would satisfy what you believe hurts no one: The publishing industry releases all audio book downloads without DRM. People with a sense of morality pay for their copy of the book. Let’s assume that’s 50% of the buying public (a rather high estimate if we’re thinking of reality).

People who usually do the right thing but are maybe strapped for cash and really want a copy, find it through other channels. Perhaps they grab a copy from a relative or friend. Perhaps they download it via Bittorrent. The source does not matter, the fact is that they acquired the copy without paying for it. Let’s assume that they make up about 30% of the buying public. But then tack on the fact that maybe some of these people will give a copy of their copy to friends family or even strangers on the internet. You’ve now taken away that many more sales from the publisher and author.

The remaining 20% are the unrepentant criminals who believe they are justified in pirating the material because it’s “too expensive” or it’s “unworthy of being paid for at any price”. These people freely copy the media everywhere and it propagated ad nauseum on the internet.

How is a publishing business going to make money like that? How would they stay in business in the first place? Are we to assume that in the future authors and publishers should just adapt to the fact that people will steal their intellectual property so they may as well sell it to the eventual minority who will still pay for it? Why would anyone create anything at that point? There must be a balance between the free for all anarchy of no DRM at all and DRM that’s so draconian it makes media completely useless.

While you might feel that you’ve made yourself a little better by gaining access to something you didn’t pay for, that doesn’t change the fact that the publisher and the author didn’t get the money they rightly deserve from you. In the long run you are still stealing and there is no moral justification for it.

I don’t know what OS the author is using but no where does he say that it’s a dual-boot setup. I happen to use Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) and boot Windows via Sun’s VirtualBox software. It works just fine but it’s still irritating to have to use it… and I would be even more irritated if I had to use it for something like an audiobook from a LIBRARY. Libraries aren’t supposed to make it difficult to borrow stuff.

I would have done exactly what the author did: try it the legal way and if I can’t make it work in a reasonable amount of time with a reasonable amount of effort… then f*ck it and grab a torrent. Too inconvenient to do it legally? Then do it illegally. One would think they’d learn; they’ve supposedly lost a lot of money trying to get everyone to do it their way.

As someone in the comments points out, he’s comparing worst-case to best-case — which is fine if you want to make a funny, satirical comic, but not so fine if you start trying to use that comic as the basis of a serious argument.

Our library uses a service that allows you to download their audiobooks to your iPod – but only a Windows-formatted iPod. Select titles, maybe 3% of what they offer, will work on a Mac, and even with those, I can’t actually make them work on a Mac. I’ve listened to about two audiobooks in my whole life, and my experience with trying to get them to work doesn’t encourage me to try more.

When I take a book out of the library, it works just the same as when I buy it from a bookstore.

Why waste time and hair on jumping through hoops?

The author mentions in the comments that he did not in fact torrent the audiobook, because torrenting is too slow.

and querent @18: you support artists etc. in any that doesn’t cost you money. do you cook them dinner? write them than thank you letters? or is it just a general statement of support for a nice sounding, fuzzy ideal.”it sure is nice that you artists spend all this time making stuff for me to enjoy for free. i support that. good on ya.” that’s like people who claim to “support the troops” but still drive giant SUVs because its convenient. a nice sounding platitude, but meaningless. and the plea that you are a poor grad student holds no water. poor grad students have always been able to buy books, records etc. you download things for free because its technologically possible, convenient and easy. then come up with justifications after the fact.

Really, even if it isn’t perfect, it ain’t that bad. I don’t have to spend time driving to the library, don’t have to worry about returning material before the due date, and actually, as long as I copy the material to the player within 1 week, it still plays fine after the expiration (due) date.

It REALLY beats the heck out of paying for audio books, puts my commute time to better use than listening to radio, and I actually have a chance to get through some of the things on my lengthy “reading” list.

I’ve accepted some compromise here, and I don’t think this is the same as “those who are willing to give up some liberty for security…”.

But I will join everyone in a chorus of “stop extending copyrights indefinitely”… do artists deserve longer terms than engineers (patents)?

I tried the service myself a while back and wasn’t impressed. I’m no audiophile but even speech compressed to 32kbps hurts my brain. I can’t imagine listening to hours of that for fun let alone jumping through hoops to do it.

Is that really true? It’s always seemed to me like publishers have a love/hate relationship with libraries. It seems like the bean counters at the publishing houses often seem to think of libraries as giant leeches on their business models, even though libraries provide a guaranteed revenue stream for books year in and year out. Some of the rhetoric that occasionally comes out of publishing houses (especially where ebooks are concerned) makes me think that they’d prefer it if libraries would just disappear altogether.

That said, Overdrive is just plain awful for audioBooks. Even though I think most DRM in principle is the publishers being overly-paranoid, I still think that if you’re going to do DRM you should be able to do something better than Overdrive. I have yet to download a single Overdrive audioBook that would play on my ipod from my library. I finally just gave up on the idea of listening to downloadable audioBooks altogether – my experience with Overdrive convinced me that I don’t even want to try to purchase the damn things if the publishers are willing to slap their names on something that is so shoddy and hand it off to libraries as a workable solution.

(I don’t support DRM, but give me a break. Half those steps are related to the ‘artist’s wacky comptuer setup.)

1) There are only a small number of “purchased” books available of each item in the library. In our case I think it is one. So if someone already has it checked out your out of luck. Currently ~98% of the adult items (fiction and non-fiction) are checked out.

2) If you have a Mac that limits the number of books you can download to your computer for use on your computer or MP3 player. So if you find a book you may not be able to download it.

3) If your portable mp3 player is an iPod that limits the number of audiobooks you can download and put on your iPod.

If instead of going to the library and jumping through hoops and involving a librarian who knows less about the technology than I do, and wasting hours of my time and theirs to borrow a book for free, who exactly does it hurt if I circumvent the tedium of that process and download a torrent instead? After listening to the book I will delete it, I won’t be lending it on to anyone else and I would never have paid for it anyway.
A huge number of paper books are lent, by libraries and by individuals. Neither the publisher nor the author make any money on these transactions. They sell one copy of a book and maybe fifty people read it.
Books also get sold second-hand. Again, the author and publisher only get paid once even though multiple people read the book.
In fact, you’ll probably find that one of the main reasons people buy new books is because they like owning books. I know I do. My shelves are groaning under the weight of books I have read only once and will never read again.
But now I have an e-book reader. Publishers want me to buy their e-books. But what do I get when I do? I don’t get anything I can put on my shelf, anything that can absorb and diffuse the memories associated with where and when I read them, nothing that makes buying any better than borrowing. And if I can borrow for free anyway, doesn’t it make sense to choose the easiest route to doing so?

Doesn’t that fly in the face of common sense and everything electronic media is all about?