Audie Awards Bust. The Audio Publishers Association (APA)
recently announced the 125 nominees for their 9th annual Audie
audiobook awards. They’ll be running a contest beginning April 1 in
which the public can vote on their favorites. I’ve been listening to
more audiobooks ever since I joined Audible as a personal subscriber, and I love the service so much that I implemented a group purchase of Audible titles in Illinois.
It would be pretty difficult for someone to listen to all 125 titles
in order to be an informed voter in the APA’s contest, but I wondered
if it could be done. My hypothesis is that it can’t because publishers
keep the majority of their titles in cassette and CD form and will not
license them to Audible. Even though the work obviously exists in an
audiobook format so there is no additional physical expense to create
it, publishers stupidly think it’s easier to hack an Audible title than
to duplicate a cassette or rip a CD. Oy.
To prove my hypothesis and show just how out of touch these
publishers are, I went through their list of 125 titles and checked to
see if each one is currently available through Audible. All finalists
were released between November 1, 2002, and October 31, 2003, so
they’ve had plenty of time to get them to Audible.
The results: 79 of the 125 titles (63%) are NOT available in
Audible, which means just 37% of the audiobook titles the industry
thinks are the best are available online as a digital audiobook.
What’s wrong with this picture? Why isn’t every
title available as a file I can load on my Treo to take with me? I
mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t all of these titles ALREADY
AUDIOBOOKS, so there shouldn’t be much of a physical cost to give them
to Audible, right? The publisher has already acquired the audiobook
rights and paid the narrator, etc., right?
Now, I know that this isn't totally the publishers fault, because
sometimes the author refuses to allow titles to be distributed in this
format. For example, I've read that J.K. Rowling has refused to make
the Harry Potter available in a purely digital format. This tells me
that Ms. Rowling fails to recognize that it is far
easier to rip one of the Harry Potter CDs than it would be to try
cracking Audible's encryption. So ultimately, in the end all it does is
deny potential readers the joy of listening to the novel.
And in the end, I'm being denied the chance to listen to 79 of the
"best" titles of the year because I don't want to carry around a
multitude of CDs or cassettes. [The Shifted Librarian]
11:40:28 AM  Google It!.
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