eMusic to offer DRM-free audiobooks
Like downloading audiobooks, but don't like being told how to listen to them? Up until now, the biggest names in downloadable audiobooks have been Audible and iTunes. Now online music site eMusic has announced it will get into the game.Unlike books purchased from Audible/iTunes, anything you buy from eMusic will be DRM-free. Want to listen to it on any computer or portable media player? No problem. All you need is a player that can handle MP3s. And a lot more media players can handle MP3 than AAC files with DRM.
And why should you care if you have an iPod? Because there are still limitations on how you can use Audible/iTunes audiobooks. Want to burn your book to several CDs so you can listen at home and in the car? No deal. You can only burn an iTunes audioboook to CD once.
eMusic also hopes to undercut Audible and iTunes on price. The New York Times reports that one launch title will be The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama. On iTunes, the audiobook will cost you $18.95. eMusic will sell it for $9.99. On the other hand, Audible and iTunes have about 15,000 titles to choose from, while eMusic will have only about 1,000 when the service goes live.
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That's part of the reason why I was so excited to find Moonlights. It shares a lot of elements with World of Goo, but is very different, too.
Like in World of Goo, you have to construct something stable out of unstable elements, and your structure needs to get to a certain destination. But that's where the similarities end, really.
Where World of Goo has a ton of personality, Moonlights is minimalistic, almost austere. ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Steve said 7:58AM on 9-18-2007
Why does everyone care about how much titles an online music or book store has? All that matters is if they have what you want. Technically, yes, you have a greater chance of finding what you want it if the catalog is larger but it it's also possible that you can find more of what you want from a catalog of say 100,000 vs. a catalog of 1,000,000.
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MikeyLikesIt said 8:11AM on 11-13-2007
This is awesome news. I've been using audible for years, and will continue to since I can't get all the titles I want from Emusic. Over the years, I've hated all the extra work I have to do to get my books to play. Burn them to disk, rip them back into mp3 so that I can have a permanent digital storage where the files won't get locked at some point in the future. It takes hours of work to do all this. With the DRM free from Emusic, I'll just have to download and play. Woohoo! Bad ass! It will be worth having an account on both sites, so that I can download content from Emusic if they have it, just to save myself from having to do all that extra work for each book.
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