Cartwright Reed

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.

ALA Over. On to O'Reilly's Tools of Change, etc.

ALA was a great show. Met with librarians, publishers and resellers and sent a bunch of players out to libraries to review. Now, we're doing some final tinkering before we begin to ship players this Friday for those people that pre-ordered it.

I've noticed a certain rhythm to my posts. Mostly that I'm talking a lot about shows that we're preparing for and showing in. I want to do some posts that go into more detail on how we're developing downloads, hardware, software, new titles and such. I promise I'll get to it next week. But (of course) now we're prepping for O'Reilly's "Tools Of Change For Publishers in New York from Feb 11-13. We'll be showing off some new download and playback features and make a few announcements as well.

As a card carrying blogger, I've got to at least mention Steve Job's keynote and Macworld. I think the video rental program that he's announced is a game changer (not that Jupiter Research agrees) for the movie industry, mostly because he's pulled in enough content and is offering rentals at an attractive enough price that it should take off.

First day of ALA Midwinter

The company is prepping for the first day of the American Library Midwinter 2008 Association Meeting in Philadelphia. As the home team, just about everyone in the company will be out there attending the show. The press release announcing our new iofy Player will be up shortly, although it won't get on the wires until tomorrow. UPDATE: Here it is!

ALA shows are important to us: a third of all audiobooks revenue comes from your local library. See the Audio Publishers Association fact sheet for details.

We'll be giving out a limited number of players at the show, which runs through January 14th. Come by and see us at booth #1839, courtesy Ingram Digital Group.

Second day at the CES - blogger conversations

Reporting in from the BlogHaus at the Bellagio, courtesy PodTech and Seagate. In between business meetings, I'm spending some time talking to bloggers to get a better idea of what we can do to make the iofy audiobook player a good podcasting player as well. I'm very happy with the software that our development team has created to make listening to an audiobook a simple and pleasurable experience. Now we need to do the same thing for podcasting and video blogs with an audio track.

Yesterday and today, I've talked to bloggers about the differences between regular blogging and multimedia blogging. I had a chance to talk to bloggers with a tight focus - like tablet PCs, storage devices or technology and driving - as well as bloggers that are part of multi-topic blogging teams like Microsoft's Channel 9.

In general, people agreed that podcasting and video blogging are not following the same path as regular blogging. First, multimedia blogging audiences are much smaller, and second, making compelling audio and video content is a lot harder.

Multimedia bloggers were frustrated by the success of text-only blogs. General agreement was that it was much harder to get people to commit to watch a video blog or listen to a podcast unless they were doing something else - typically driving or exercising, just like audiobooks.

BlogHaus at CES

I'll be at the BlogHaus Tuesday afternoon from 5PM to 8PM.

A place for bloggers, podcasters, video bloggers, and other online media creators to meet, have some food, relax, and share the day’s news at the Consumer Electronics Show — CES.

Like last year, its being held at the Bellagio Hotel & Casino, Suite #6601 - Spa Tower.  See you there!

iofy will be exhibiting at the ALA in Jan '08

As the American Library Association (ALA) will be in our home town of Philadelphia for their Midwinter conference this January 11 to 14, we'll have the whole iofy team out to show our products. Ingram, our distribution partner, is courteously sharing their big booth with us this year. We'll be showing off the new iofy player and demonstrating download services for librarians, resellers and publishers.

We'll be giving a limited number of iofy players away with bestselling titles, so come by and say hello!