Random House Giving Up DRM


Now that Random House is going to sell their digital audiobooks DRM-free to all vendors, I can only hope that Overdrive and Audible open up their systems. Once Audible becomes a full-fledged part of Amazon, I think they'll change their ways, but Overdrive? They're probably too beholden to the Microsoft DRM mess to retool. If they don't retool, I hope they wither and die, frankly. The only thing Overdrive offers libraries is a legal way to check out digital audio. We don't own the files, can't take them anywhere else...who needs that?

What libraries need is a stand alone mechanism that can store files and serve them up via some kind of SIP authentication, integrated somehow with the ILS. Any vendors doing that? I could probably tool something together using Ruby on Rails, but the ol' ILS in and out, my droogies, there's the rub.

Plan B:

Instead of Playaways, which we have been buying, we could just get a couple of eMusic accounts, each account allowing two monthly audiobook downloads for $19.99 a month, and buy some cheap mp3 players that have displays, and circ those. If the iPod shuffle only had a display. The price is right: $49. Those would take care of the folks who don't have computers or their own players, then we could allow the technophiles come in and download onto their own devices. We could even burn the files to MP3 CD for circulation. Still not the optimal solution, but better and cheaper than what we give them now: Playaways, Books on CD, and Overdrive. Blech.

Link to the Random House Story on Boing Boing

Posted: Wed - February 27, 2008 at 08:41 AM      

©