Peter Giger

I heard Chris Anderson’s new book is going to be called “Free”. Isn’t that discussion a little bit old. Aren’t we living in an attention economy – and don’t come and tell me there are free things in our contemporary attention economy – well, perhaps if you’re living in the outskirts of outer Alaska or Siberia…

I was looking for an interesting science fiction audiobook and landed on this page:

I really wanted to buy this book, but I can’t get myself to buy something purposely destroyed with DRM. This is not the first time I’ve landed on a Audible page and almost instantly bounced away due to the stupid DRM policy. You’ll have to figure out the link to Audible, I don’t want to promote them with a link.

Instead I bought a mp3 audiobook by the Swedish publisher Piratförlaget. They have sold their books as watermarked, but DRM free, for years now. Recently, the largest publisher in Sweden, Bonniers,  joined the mp3 audiobook revolution.

So instead of a sf book I really wanted I bought a criminal novel I enjoyed, delivered in a format I can accept.

I searched a bit and found lots of others who hate the Audible DRM policy, Lance’s TextBox is one of them. You can also sign a petition for Amazon (who now own Audible) to remove DRM.