{"id":245,"date":"2008-03-20T16:38:00","date_gmt":"2008-03-20T03:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/?p=245"},"modified":"2013-11-04T12:56:29","modified_gmt":"2013-11-03T23:56:29","slug":"overdrive-to-offer-3000-drm-free-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/overdrive-to-offer-3000-drm-free-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Overdrive to offer 3000 DRM-free books"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via walking paper scraps<\/a>, OverDrive Breaks the iPod Barrier for Downloadable Audio<\/a> – by the end of June 3000 audiobooks will be available in mp3 format with no “digital rights management” (aka “crippling”) – so they can be played on Macs, iPods, etc. They’re also apparently going to release an “OverDrive Media Console for the Mac” which presumably lets their normal range of audiobooks be played on Macs (but not iPods etc).<\/p>\n

This is great news, and hopefully one more sign that DRM might be gradually going out of fashion. It’s not just that it’s nasty to restrict how a person can listen to something that they’ve paid for; it’s that making it hard for people to listen to your music (or watch your videos or read your books) is a great way to induce them to look for alternatives – like piracy.<\/p>\n

And DRM does diddly-squat to prevent piracy. Codes can be, and regularly are, broken; there’s free software all over the internet to extract audio and video from ‘protected’ files, and even if there weren’t there’s still audio capture and video capture programs (just like screen capture but more so).<\/p>\n

So DRM a) doesn’t prevent piracy, and b) induces your potential customers to consider turning to piracy. So what was the point again?<\/p>\n

Fortunately a lot of people are starting to realise that not only is DRM fairly useless, but giving stuff away entirely free can make you money. In the science-fiction world, for example:<\/p>\n