Answered Question

philliplu...

M$1 April 02, 2009 02:09 PM

Does Audible employ DRM in their eBooks? And if they do, is there anything on the horizon about them removing it?

I'm an eBook newb and am looking to try it out, but as a dude that rocks several devices and likes to keep them sync'd, DRM is a huge turn off. Deal-breaker, even.

Thanks in advance for the info!

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hartwell

April 02, 2009 02:37 PM

The files have DRM. This isn't likely to change in the near future. (The politics and contracts of the book publishing industry make the music and film industries look simple.)

You do have the option with the audible player software to burn your books (there's a phrase!) as orange book CDs. (Regular music CD.) Then, you can rip the CD to MP3 or Ogg or whatever.

You may or may not want a stack of CDs to put in your car or lend to friends. There are ways to fool the audible program into thinking that it is burning a CD when actually it is creating an ISO file. (CD Image file.) Then you can mount that file and rip it as if it were a real CD.

Third party software can automate this task for you.

Asker's Rating:

• right on; thanks for the info, insight, and expanded info on ways to side-step the DRM stuff.

good point on the publisher contracts, as well - i hadn't thought of that.

hope all's calm, and keep on mahalo'ing,
/phil

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mattix

April 02, 2009 02:15 PM

Yes audible employs DRM. You usually have to use their Audible Download Manager to manage your books and if you import them into iTunes you will need to provide your Audible account information in order to activate the ebook.

From WikiPedia:
"Audible's use of digital rights management on its .aa format has earned it criticism13. While multiple software products are capable of removing the Audible DRM protection by re-encoding in other formats14, Audible has been quick to threaten the software makers with lawsuits for discussing or promoting this ability, as happened with River Past Corp and GoldWave Inc15. Responses have varied, with River Past removing the capability from their software, and GoldWave retaining the capability, but censoring discussions about the ability in its support forums. But there are still many other software tools from non-US countries which bypass the DRM control of Audible either with a sound recording or virtual CD burning method. Typical examples are TuneBite, SoundTaxi, NoteCable (sound recording) and Phantom Burner, NoteBurner, Tune4Mac (virtual CD burning)."

Judging by the tone of this I doubt they will be removing their DRM anytime soon. I have also not heard anything about them removing it.
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audible.com

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