It's obvious that Doctorow -- a number of whose novels have been produced as audiobooks and who, for some time, has offered free podcasts of himself reading his own work -- is more than just a casual fan of the audiobook medium. The word "fanatic" comes to mind as one reads his description of how he moved his hundreds of Audible.com titles to a Linux computer by painstakingly playing each file in real time in order to convert it to MP3.
Doctorow's article is interesting and thought provoking, but -- as authors and publishers often do -- he focuses entirely on the retail side of the audiobook world. When he points out that retail sales of audiobooks on CD "are in freefall while digital delivery... is skyrocketing," he fails to consider that audiobooks on CD -- and other physical formats such as MP3-CD and, yes, Playaway -- continue to be hugely popular with public libraries and their patrons.
Doctorow describes the complicated reasons that Little Brother, his 2008 novel for young readers, isn't available on Audible or iTunes. Basically, it seems that he instructed his agent to refuse any deal that would impose Digital Rights Management (DRM) on the end user. Because Random House didn't want to undertake the cost of releasing the title on CD and because he didn't want to accept DRM and end-user license restrictions, Doctorow says that the audiobook edition of Little Brother has been for sale only as a digital download, (and at that, available only direct from Random House Audio).
For Doctorow, agreeing to permit DRM on his creative works amounts to selling his audiobooks "on terms that insist my listeners only use devices approved by a DRM vendor," effectively locking customers in to the vendor's proprietary "ecosystem".
But circumstances are changing, and there are other things going on that Doctorow doesn't mention. According to Amazon and other sources, there will in fact be a retail version of Little Brother on audio CD, available in May 2010.
And Doctorow doesn't mention it, but since 2008, libraries have been able to buy a "library edition" CD of Little Brother from Books on Tape, a division of Random House. According to WorldCat, some 271 libraries have this CD edition in their collection.
Furthermore, public libraries that subscribe to the Overdrive downloadable e-audiobook service can offer their patrons a DRM-free MP3 version of Doctorow's book. Most of Overdrive's e-audiobook titles continue to be available only in WMA format with built-in DRM that makes the content expire at the end of the library borrowing period. Recently, however, a few publishers, Random House Audio among them, have begun to experiment with dropping DRM on selected titles -- even in the library sphere. A title that's on loan is unavailable to other users until the end of the lending period, but unlike the DRM-ed WMA files that make up the majority of the OverDrive collection, the files themselves do not expire and can be easily moved from one device to another. Under the terms of the OverDrive end-user license, users are obliged to delete the files from their devices at the end of the loan period, but essentially this is an honor system.
Even so, the OverDrive arrangement doesn't fully meet all of Doctorow's criteria for seamless access and ease of use. It's still necessary to download and install proprietary OverDrive software in order to acquire the MP3 files, and the system isn't necessarily optimized for use by the blind or physically disabled, who, as Doctorow points out, make up a significant portion of the audiobook audience.
Doctorow is correct that the bottom seems to be falling out of the retail market for audiobooks on CD. But retail demand for downloadable audiobooks is strong, and sales through Audible, iTunes, and others continue to grow, though, so far not to the point of having made up all the way for declining revenue from CD sales. (This despite all those dollars that Doctorow himself appears to have spent at Audible before deciding their end-user license terms were unacceptable to him.)
One result of this is that some audiobook publishers -- especially those that have tended in the past to focus on retail sales and to ignore the library market -- have begun to cut back on the number of audiobook titles they release on CD, sending more and more of them straight into the "digital-only" realm of the download services.
On the retail side, the trend seems to be decidedly away from DRM. Certainly that's the way that music sales have gone, and recent decisions by Random House Audio make it look more likely that audiobook publishers will go the same route as music publishers and make their titles available online DRM-free. But how will this play out for libraries? This is the part that doesn't get talked about much in the DRM debates.
While all this may be fine for devotees of Audible and iTunes, and even for OverDrive users on the library side, it could be leaving out a big middle ground of people who aren't ready to make the leap into downloadables and who still want a convenient physical format. And as many iPod users have been frustrated to discover, their device is compatible with some but not all OverDrive titles. (Not so for the new crop of devices equipped with Google's Android operating system, so the landscape may be changing.)
Fortunately for those folks not willing or able to take advantage of downloadable audiobooks, many titles published as digital-only are now making there way onto Playaway. And for the many library patrons who borrow audiobooks on CD specifically in order to rip them and move them onto an iPod or other portable media player, the Playaway version is also good news -- Playaway titles of course are already loaded onto a portable player, so the CD-rippers can save several steps. And because Playaway is a secure physical format, there's no need for complicated DRM wars.
Doctorow's dilemma still remains, but audiobook listeners who look to their public library as a source for new listening experiences can rest assured that they'll continue to have options. And one of those options will be Playaway.
Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Sr. Manager for Content Strategy
