While music went DRM free yesterday, audiobooks did not. Audible audiobooks are likely to be the one thing in the audio downloads at iTunes and elsewhere that will still have DRM. What does that mean? You can't listen to audiobooks bought from audible on your Sony Reader or Kindle even though both devices have audio capabilities. Does that suck? Of course it does.
And what about the DRM'ed books you bought that you can no longer access because your one computer crashed or the authentication server is down and so on and so forth?
DRM is not only crippling in the music and book industry, but it is also a big issue in the gaming industry and based upon a huge brouhaha involving the release of an iPhone app, Spore, and Sony rootkit issues, and oh, many other examples, the FTC is holding a townhall meeting on the issue of DRM . Given the DMCA, I don't believe the FTC would have the right to eliminate DRM but maybe they could make it so onerous for content providers that DRM becomes too costly to use?
You can submit questions to drmtownhall@ftc.gov in advance of January 30, 2009. The actual townhall will take place on March 25. That's one CSPAN event I'll be TIVO-ing.
Actually, you can listen to audible books on Kindle– in fact Audible has a patch specifically for the Kindle. It eats the battery so I don’t recommend it, but it can be done.
ETA: I also meant to say this looks interesting and I will be following it and maybe submitting a comment or two.
Oh it’s getting better yet: did you see the info linked from BoingBoing.net that Fictionwise can no longer guarantee your third-party format ebooks since one of their third party server providers will be shutting down at the end of January?
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/01/08/ebook-drm-provider-g.html
Ebook readers might want to back up locally as soon as possible.