Cartwright Reed

the iofy platform: the future of spoken audio

In 2005 we were working on the next generation of the iofy spoken audio platform. The company had been successfully selling our first digital spoken audio on websites like PimsleurDirect for a year or so, but we had a lot of work to do, and there were some pretty dispiriting things going on - like the Sony Rootkit scandal.

About that time, I came upon Fred Wilson's post on the future of media:

1 - Microchunk it - Reduce the content to its simplest form. Thanks Umair.
2 - Free it - Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it. Thanks Stewart.
3 - Syndicate it - Let anyone take it and run with it.  Thanks Dave.
4 - Monetize it - Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk. Thanks Feedburner.

Fred's vision of how media should be was clean and refreshing, and it was what we wanted to do. We wanted to make spoken audio content an intelligently chunked, non-proprietary, syndicatable, monetizable citizen of the net.

Three years later, we are finally completing a solid platform; where we can enable people to enjoy spoken audio in a way that goes with the grain of the Internet (courtesy Paul Graham). We've gotten validation from publishers, resellers and distributors: now we need to show consumers a good time.

I'm looking forward to talking to people about this at the PLA in two weeks. See you soon!

More Publishers Phase Out Piracy Protection on Audiobooks

More publishers are coming on board!

Wednesday morning links

Item: O'Reilly has uploaded some of the presentations from the Tools of Change (TOC) conference in New York two weeks ago. Although I enjoyed the conference, I was surprised by the tension between the old guard - hard goods contingent and a somewhat wifty "digital solves everything" group. Most O'Reilly conferences are a bit more hard core. I missed this presentation by Kirk Biglione, but the uploaded PDF is a compelling review of the mistakes made by the music industry in the jump to digital.

Item: You should check out Chris Anderson's post on his new "FREE" meme at Wired.  It's entertaining reading and has a lot of implications for digital media (and could have the legs of his last meme). I think that the characteristics of your digital offering defines the business model, not vice versa, but "FREE" is a great new investigation of digital goods.

Item: "Apple's iTunes will likely whip past Wal-Mart Stores to become the largest U.S. music retailer sometime this year." See the CNET post.

Audiobook Acceleration!

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.