Publishers Dropping Audiobook DRM

The music industry is dropping DRM, and now the audiobook industry is following suit. The best part is, they’re not acting based on a trend. They’re acting on actual data.

Publishers, like the music labels and movie studios, stuck to D.R.M. out of fear that pirated copies would diminish revenue. Random House tested the justification for this fear when it introduced the D.R.M.-less concept with eMusic last fall. It encoded those audio books with a digital watermark and monitored online file sharing networks, only to find that pirated copies of its audio books had been made from physical CDs or D.R.M.-encoded digital downloads whose anticopying protections were overridden.

“Our feeling is that D.R.M. is not actually doing anything to prevent piracy,” said Ms. McIntosh of Random House Audio.

So far, the audiobook industry has been dominated by Audible and iTunes specifically because of DRM. Publishers are waking up to the greater risk presented by DRM: losing illusory copy control to consumers is not as bad as losing the whole industry to one distributor.