The audiobook space is humming, what with Amazon's purchase of Audible and now Random House's announcement to go DRM-free in the retail market. iofy will have some announcements of our own to make at the PLA show coming up in a few weeks.
About the Random House story: Cory Doctorov was the first to blog about Random House, but there was no independent confirmation from RH. Sol Young, iofy's VP of engineering, blogged about it and got immediate responses from Cory - and a comment on his blog confirming the new RH policy from Madeline Mcintosh (she also emailed him). Mcintosh is the publisher of Random House Audio.
Here's the important part of Madeline Macintosh's letter (courtesy Boing Boing) to publishing partners:
... because we believe that the future health of the audiobook category will depend on allowing a competitive retail marketplace, we will now allow our retail partners to sell in the MP3 format (in other words, without DRM).
This new approach from Random House represents forward thinking as the audiobook industry makes the digital jump. DRM isn't going away; there are business models, authors and titles where DRM may be appropriate, just as copy protection is used in the software market.
But the audiobook retail market will grow in a more healthy way without DRM, and iofy is looking forward to working with publishers that want to be part of that growth.
There are a bunch of missing blog posts on iofy web services, Amazon's Kindle ebook reader, Amazon's MP3 audio offering and the Apple iPhone. Let's see if I can get them all out next week.
