Just a brief ten minute mid-morning break to note that though I respect my colleague Michael Stephens, I disagree with his comments and conclusions in his post about iPods in libraries.
I am working on a longer post about audiobooks and DRM, inspired by my jaw-dropping Moment of Zen last Friday when I downloaded audiobooks purchased by my library but was unable to play them on my Treo (though I could see them, and I have Pocket Tunes, a WMA player) because of the stringent digital rights management (DRM) used by the ebook vendor.
It’s a book. I’m a patron. I want to read it. “Books are for use.”
But though I’m going to say some pointed things about libraries providing books that only one operating system can play, and it is absolutely true that without some gymnastics you can’t put an Overdrive or Recorded Books audiobook on an iPod any more than you can on a WMA player, Apple is not a hero in this discussion, and Apple’s greedily monopolistic tactics will get their due as well. Michael says he has “lamented that some of the big names in recorded e-content don’t recognize the iPod.” Ask Real about recognizing iPods; Apple went after Real for enabling Realplayer to import Apple’s proprietary AAC format.
More on this next week; I’m gathering information. My ten minutes are up; gotta finish making sure the lunches get ordered for tomorrow’s board meeting. (I love my board, they are the coolest, but that’s another post.)
Posted on this day, other years:
- MOOC Nation, Part 1: My So-Called Online Teaching Life - 2013
- Stiffed Again - 2008
- Comment Guidelines - 2004
- Jack Stephens Voted Off FRL Island - 2004
I don’t see how this is different from public libraries having only one platform of computers for patrons to use? While the ebook format is supposed to be portable, at least somewhat, the whole deal with the iPods is that you use them as listening devices, not as just content transportation devices. I agree that AAC format is proprietary and that’s annoying, but iPods also allow usage of files in the the MP3 format which, while not an open standard, is at least openly used and exchangable. You can play any MP3 on an iPod. I’m not totally rah rah Apple but I think the problem with DRM and AAC format is a different argument than why iPods might be good for libraries. Frankly there are MANY cheaper MP3 players if that’s what you’re after.
I’m not sure there are any corporate heroes in the digital music world at this point. The lockdown is now happening with more security on commercially released CDs and the Napster unlimited download, while good in theory, requires hotsynching to keep your music files active – how clunky and ball-and-chainish is that? Plus no CD burning there without paying the per song cost.
Plus…none of these address true sound quality issues which can be vital with music, but not so much with audiobooks.
Not to travel too far down this road…but in the video realm it seems like recent innovations are giving us better picture and sound quality, reasonably convenient storage (that’s about to jump in capacity in a big way), and greater personal control (Tivo and such)….
While the music and sound industry is shackling our music ever more tightly (geez…at least they didn’t tell us in the past how many record players we could play our records on), lowering the sound quality…and telling us it’s a great innovation to be able to carry our music and sound around…we’ve been doing that for decades (yeah yeah I know the capacity thing…but still…100 songs on CDs really doesn’t take up a huge amount of space)
I’m not sure what the point is here, Jessamyn. You say “I agree that AAC format is proprietary and that’s annoying, but iPods also allow usage of files in the the MP3 format which, while not an open standard, is at least openly used and exchangable.” Well, of course they are going to allow MP3s on their players. Monopolists are good at strategy.
As for library computers, the analogy doesn’t work. The thrust of my argument here is about the ability of a user to perform a reasonable task, such as reading a book.
Hey, what happened to the longer post? Did I miss it? Still an interesting question (audiobooks & DRM), & worth following up.
Good article and comments. I love downloading podcasts to my iPod and making playlists because it is convenient; I can listen to them at anytime.