> One trick about “reading” (listening) to a good chunk of books has been Audible, to retain the content I’m listening to on my commutes and on the go I take a lot of notes.
While I share your enthusiasm about audiobooks, I encourage you to leave Audible behind:
- Audible is heavy on DRM, for no particular reason except for platform lockin and control. There are plenty of DRM free alternatives e.g. https://audiobookstore.com/ or https://www.downpour.com/ . To this day Audible doesn't sell Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, because they insist on adding DRM (which the author doesn't permit – he has strong principles regarding digital freedom).
- Audible, like Amazon, is becoming too much of a monopoly, which in general harms the product/user (remember IE6?). You don't even have to look for alternatives because of lofty principles, but just for your selfish interests to have a prospering alternative at hand, when Audible/Amazon screws you over.
Amazon can — and have — reach into your Kindle and delete books you have there (notably, they did this to 1984, proving that real life can be ironic).
You cannot lend one Kindle book to someone else, without lending the entire Kindle.
Your phone, computer and TV run binary code which can do literally anything (say, logging your passwords and transmitting them in unused protocol headers), which you are not permitted to remove or modify, in the name of DRM and similar user-restricting technologies.
I believe the publishers want DRM. I'm not sure they want DRM that effectively locks in their readers to the Amazon ecosystem. I don't believe publishers would be upset if I could directly purchase books from Apple, Google, Kobo, or any other similar vendor directly on the Kindle.
Is the audiobook market different? I know Cory Doctorow for one would like to sell his audio books through Audible but they require DRM. Care to defend that?
> If another company offers you a better deal for your creative work and you switch, your audience can't follow you to the new company without giving up all the audiobooks they've bought to date. That's a lot to ask of listeners!
It's not the original copies of your content that are locked forever: it's the copies that Audible has sold to your readers.
> I suspect sooner or later the book industry will have to go DRM-free to break Amazon's ebook stranglehold, in much the same way.
I wonder about this, because the fact is that I really LIKE Amazon's system. It doesn't matter where music comes from, I listen to it over and over and usually listen to each song totally.
But with books, it takes more than 3 minutes to read. The fact that all my stuff (Kindle App, Kindle, website) know my place and sync all that stuff is very handy. It's the main reason I use Kindle over physical books.
If you load non-DRMed eBooks onto Kindle my understanding is you don't get that functionality for them and I'm guessing no one would have the power to force Amazon to implement that feature. The end result is that Amazon's DRMed books may be more appealing to me than DRM free options from other places.
As for breaking their monopoly.... Apple tried and the government smacked them down for it.
> There’s a lifetime of interesting books on Amazon
To the extent that the masses of reprinted-as-a-book Wikipedia articles, CC-licensed and public-domain content, or even GPT-generated books don’t sneak into Amazon’s selection.
Note that these are merely the books where the copyright has already expired, so they can be freely put online. There is much more of the fresher content.
Audiobooks.
https://doctorow.medium.com/why-none-of-my-books-are-availab...
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