Audiobook creators and publishers must allow Audible to permanently, irrevocably lock every product they sell to Amazon’s ecosystem.

Which means that if you’re hoping to tempt Audible customers into switching stores, you have to rely on their willingness to give up all the audiobooks they ever bought from Audible, or to maintain multiple unwieldy, confusing tools to manage their audiobook libraries.Īnd here’s the kicker: Audible’s DRM is mandatory. The upshot? Amazon is the only one that can legally provide Audible customers with a tool to move their Audible books to a rival audiobook player. DMCA 1201 provides for a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine…and that’s just for a first offense. The people who create and share DRM-breaking tools don’t care about violating the law, but audiobook stores who’d like to compete with Amazon’s monopoly do, mostly because Amazon knows where to find them, and can ask the US government to charge them with felonies if they make DRM-breaking tools. In practice, DRM technologies are always broken, swiftly and comprehensively, and any dishonest person who wishes to bypass the DRM can easily find out how to do so with just a few quick searches.ĭRM doesn’t slow down criminals, but it stops law abiding competitors dead in their tracks. DRM is sold to publishers and authors as a tool to prevent copyright infringement: they’re promised that DRM is a technology that somehow makes it impossible for their customers to copy and share their creative works.