Techdirt Podcast Episode 256: Little Brother vs. Big Audiobook, With Cory Doctorow
from the doing-something-different dept
The third book in Cory Doctorow's Little Brother series is coming soon — but as usual, Cory is doing something different as part of the release. Fans and Techdirt readers know he's an outspoken opponent of DRM who makes sure all his work is available DRM-free, but that isn't so easy when it comes to audiobooks, where Audible's market dominance forces DRM onto everything. So while publishers eagerly picked up Attack Surface for printing, he retained the audio rights and is running his first-ever Kickstarter to release a nice non-DRM version. This week, Cory joins Mike on the podcast to discuss why he's doing it, what he's giving up, and the industry changes he hopes to inspire.
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Filed Under: attack surface, audiobooks, books, cory doctorow, drm, little brother, publishing
Companies: amazon, audible, kickstarter
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Cory's remarks on Amazon music and Apple's iTunes
Apple's iTunes had DRM circa 2003, and ended in 2009, but during that time, the DRM was ridiculously easy to circumvent: All you had to do was burn a bunch of tracks you bought from the iTunes store onto a CD-R, then rip them into iTunes, and voilà! The music you bought from iTunes lost its DRM! Of course there's a loss in audio quality, but fortunately, competition from Amazon led them to abandon DRM altogether, and then Bandcamp allowed lossless file formats (and digital files that iTunes wouldn't offer, such as PDFs or JPEGS, for instance) to flourish. So the music industry is actually better off in this respect for consumers than the film, television, or literary industries.
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Hostels in Kota for Boys & Girls @ ₹5k*|1 Month SD| Zolo
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