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Why none of my books are available on Audible

doctorow.medium.com

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Re: Why none of my books are available on Audible

#61

Post by zmgsabst »

exotree wrote: post #14

“ My agent tells me that if I’d been willing to set aside my ethics and allow Audible to slap DRM on my books, I’d have made enough money to pay off my mortgage and save enough to pay for my kid’s entire college education. That’s a price I’m willing to pay.” I have to be honest and say… I think I would be very frustrated with my spouse if this principle cost us so much potential financial freedom in other parts of ou…

How much of your frustration in life is because other people’s spouses convinced them to take the money?

That kind of sacrifice is a negative sum game: when we all do it, we’re all worse off.

Re: Why none of my books are available on Audible

#62

Post by riekus »

MrFantastic wrote: post #49
icyfox wrote: post #36

Audible has some flagrant dark patterns in their design for consumers as well. While you _could_ buy independent audiobooks at cost, their most popular model is to subscribe to a monthly membership where you earn one credit a month. This monthly credit can buy any audio book. The dig comes if you decide you have too many credits cached. Perhaps because you can't get through one audiobook a month. If you cancel a subs…

You can suspend your Audible account as well. This allows you to keep your credits but you won't be charged.

But this is limited as well, max 6 months and only 1 timer per x If I recall correctly, I just ripped my bought books and canceled

Re: Why none of my books are available on Audible

#63

Post by sockaddr »

icyfox wrote: post #36

Audible has some flagrant dark patterns in their design for consumers as well. While you _could_ buy independent audiobooks at cost, their most popular model is to subscribe to a monthly membership where you earn one credit a month. This monthly credit can buy any audio book. The dig comes if you decide you have too many credits cached. Perhaps because you can't get through one audiobook a month. If you cancel a subs…

It is an absolutely horrible way to treat customers. Don't use their service.

I've had a subscription for a while and it has helped me read more books but this cancellation policy is absolutely bonkers. They really are actively trying to hurt and squeeze the customer more than any other service I've used. I downgraded my subscription (to stop receiving credits) but I'm still having trouble using the credits I did build up. As soon as I'm done I'll be cancelling forever.

Re: Why none of my books are available on Audible

#64

Post by Macha »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #18
Mordisquitos wrote: post #7

I very much agree with him regarding DRM, and I understand why it puts him off launching audiobooks on Audible. Still, it is worth commenting that there are trivial ways to remove DRM from Audible files. I myself do it to my own collection, partly out of "lockout prevention", and partly so that I can listen to the books using apps that I find infinitely more covenient and feature rich than Audible's own (shout-out to…

This is why I don’t mind buying TV Shows on iTunes. What I ultimately want is a DRM Free file, and I know how to losslessly strip DRM from iTunes media, so whatever, I’ll go ahead and buy whatever I want to watch. The difference with audiobooks, though, is there are several audiobook retailers that are natively DRM Free, such as downpour and libro.fm. Why buy from the DRM’d vendor, who could increase their protection…

Is there an updated way since TunesKit got broken and you needed to keep around an old version of iTunes for Windows (which apple will eventually break)?

Re: Why none of my books are available on Audible

#65

Post by ldjb »

"This essay, which I am about to record as an audiobook […], and will thereafter upload to ACX as a self-published, free audiobook."

Doctorow seems to have intended to release this audiobook on Audible for free. However, when I look it up on Audible's website, it is on sale for a regular price of £3.69 (or £3.23 / one credit for Audible members). I wonder why this is.

This is not a criticism of Doctorow; I think he probably doesn't expect people to actually pay for it, and he's released a DRM-free copy, free of charge.

I wonder if this is something that Audible enforces (i.e. they do not normally allow audiobooks to be available free of charge). I have seen some audiobooks available free of charge on Audible, but perhaps those are the exception rather than the rule.

Re: Why none of my books are available on Audible

#66

Post by Wowfunhappy »

Macha wrote: post #64
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I don’t mind buying TV Shows on iTunes. What I ultimately want is a DRM Free file, and I know how to losslessly strip DRM from iTunes media, so whatever, I’ll go ahead and buy whatever I want to watch. The difference with audiobooks, though, is there are several audiobook retailers that are natively DRM Free, such as downpour and libro.fm. Why buy from the DRM’d vendor, who could increase their protection…

Is there an updated way since TunesKit got broken and you needed to keep around an old version of iTunes for Windows (which apple will eventually break)?

No, I just use the old version of iTunes in a virtual machine. When Apple breaks it, I'll stop buying things on iTunes. But I already have DRM-Free copies of all my current purchases.

And then for new movies I use Amazon alongside a different program which works with that.

Re: Why none of my books are available on Audible

#67

Post by ldjb »

icyfox wrote: post #36

Audible has some flagrant dark patterns in their design for consumers as well. While you _could_ buy independent audiobooks at cost, their most popular model is to subscribe to a monthly membership where you earn one credit a month. This monthly credit can buy any audio book. The dig comes if you decide you have too many credits cached. Perhaps because you can't get through one audiobook a month. If you cancel a subs…

There are many valid criticisms of Audible, but I think membership pricing is just something that will suit some people more than others.

Personally, I have no trouble buying on average one book per month. I think that the ability to accumulate credits offers quite a lot of flexibility. Instead of being forced to buy one book every month, I can opt not to buy a book this month, but instead buy two books next month.

Although it is annoying that you lose all your credits if you cancel, there are plenty of books to spend them on. And I don't think it's entirely reasonable for Audible to hold on to your credits for eternity – since you could redeem them at any point, they'd have to keep a pot of money sitting around for paying rights holders. Imagine if something happened and a huge amount of people decided to redeem all their credits all at once – without a huge amount of cash set aside, Audible could have trouble fulfilling all those orders.

So I think the pricing system isn't so bad, but the DRM situation is very disappointing.

Re: Why none of my books are available on Audible

#69

Post by msh »

riekus wrote: post #62
MrFantastic wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can suspend your Audible account as well. This allows you to keep your credits but you won't be charged.

But this is limited as well, max 6 months and only 1 timer per x If I recall correctly, I just ripped my bought books and canceled

Well they have a silver membership that for 10 USD a year let's you keep your credits and access to sales.

Re: Why none of my books are available on Audible

#70

Post by knaik94 »

beckman466 wrote: post #27
Mordisquitos wrote: post #7

I very much agree with him regarding DRM, and I understand why it puts him off launching audiobooks on Audible. Still, it is worth commenting that there are trivial ways to remove DRM from Audible files. I myself do it to my own collection, partly out of "lockout prevention", and partly so that I can listen to the books using apps that I find infinitely more covenient and feature rich than Audible's own (shout-out to…

> it is worth commenting that there are trivial ways to remove DRM from Audible files. say i share with a loved one or close friend the de-DRM'd audiobook. now their computer becomes infected with a RAT, and 'my' file/audiobook fingerprinted with the proprietary fingerprint algorithm (to identify me as the unique purchaser, the same techniques are probably applied industry wide) is leaked online as a consequence (or…

The audio fingerprinting is used by services like shazam to identify music, not a per user re-encode of every single song in order to find out leaks.

The watermarked music files I have come across only go as far as identifying the distribution service, not an individual.

From what I remember the metadata of account information is added as an editable extended tags. I actually don't know if audiobooks are even tagged by account in audible's case, it's true for iTunes.

Children will have access to free audio books in the US as long as libraries are around. I can get digital audiobooks for free from my library.

Libby/Overdrive and Hoopla are great, especially for children's audiobooks.

I don't know if your argument against using dedrm tools even makes sense. The point is that you shouldn't share your decrypted audiobooks. It shouldn't matter what happens to your friend's computer. More importantly, an audiobook isn't important enough to steal, that a giant leap.

Dedrming an audiobook is the only way I know to make sure that one day audible won't wake up and say, no we don't want you listening to that book anymore and just take it off their platform after I have paid for it. That's not a theoretical, that's already happened to some with certain kindle books.

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