The sound of DRM

Last night, I finally gave in. Gave in to the audio book craze. I don’t remember the number of times I’ve entered the audible.com portal, then balked at the thought of becoming a statistic, a monthly payee to a service. I enjoy podcasts. I enjoy reading. I spend many hours in traffic, doodling and twiddling my thumbs. At least listening to something is a means of shifting my focus and preventing me from engaging in a one-on-one war with a Gauteng taxi. Come to think of it, that’s almost like being a Linux devotee and subscribing to audible. Let me explain from the beginning…

A subscription to audible runs you a couple of Yankee greens a month. For that, you have the pleasure of downloading one audio book of your choice. Considering the fact that these digital tomes weigh in at five hours plus, a book a month should be sufficient. The sign-up process is the usual web 2.0 cut and paste your credit card details. Then you’re done. Select a book and download. audible uses a mega compression method that is able to fit those five or more hours into a file smaller than 80MB, on average. Depending on the format you choose, of course.

Snag one for open source aficionados: choice is Windows or Apple only. Snag two: choice of Format 1, Format 2, Format 3 or Format 4. Forget OGG or even MP3.

These files are encrypted. DRM‘ed. No chance of getting them to play without some outside assistance. You can’t even download them in a conventional way. For that, you need the Audible Manager, and it wants to know your preferred device.

Then, it connects to the portal and checks out your order

So here’s the thing. You’re out of luck as a Linux user from the beginning. No way to download, because the Audible Manager won’t run on that platform. You can try Wine or VMWare, but then you’re back to Windows. My Nano runs Rockbox. It won’t play the AA files natively. The only means of uncorking this DRM soup is to burn a CD, then convert back to a format you want. Hey presto, no more DRM!

Not so fast, Kowalski! Seems you need Nero or Roxio to utilize the burn feature. It’s unlikely to work in the Nero Linux release, as you have to authorize Nero to prevent this message:

Finally, burn the audio to a CD.

No more DRM means you can do what you want. Which raises, once again, the interesting question as to what purpose DRM is supposed to serve. Protecting intellectual property is all well and good, but as a legitimate buyer, this is a tedious, yet necessary, workaround. From the get-go, I can’t use my chosen operating system, and have to jump through hoops to get what I want. Apple has seen the light. Hopefully, audible will get there too. You do need Windows or Mac OS. There’s only so much the penguin can do…

By the way, that’s my only gripe with audible. I look forward to listening to my first, hard-earned audio book