Hachette experimenting with DRMless audio books: E-books next?
Hatchette, home to many best-sellers such as James Patterson’s, is distributing e-books via the ePub format. Can another progressive move, such as a back-off from DRMed e-books be ahead? Mix that with ePub and consumers would have a true standard without proprietary DRM to muck it up.
For fans of Patterson and other Hachette authors, some hope comes from Laura Dawson’s account from a Book Industry Study Group conference:
“Hachette spoke about their experiment with DRM-free audiobooks. Via E-music.com, Hachette released about 10% of their audiobook list in total, watermarking them instead of loading the files up with DRM. They found there was no piracy of watermarked titles; but there was theft of non-watermarked titles that had been ripped from CDs and posted on peer-to-peer sharing sites. They intend to put more titles into the program.”
(Spotted via Peter Brantley.)
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