Will the Penguin come back?

New York Times reports that publisher Penguin Audio has ended its agreement with eMusic, the digital music and audiobook service, by pulling its 150 titles from the program.

The main reason are their concerns over digital piracy.

“At this moment we’re not going to have our titles on eMusic or with anyone else who sells non-DRM until the landscape shakes out and we feel very comfortable and confident that our titles will not be pirated,” said Dick Heffernan, publisher of Penguin Audio, according to the Times. “We wanted to take a chance and see how it would work out, and our very senior management at this moment decided that we didn’t want to do that. We hope to possibly come to some kind of agreement down the road.”

While worry about digital piracy is reasonable, it appears wide of the mark here. Consider, people who purchase audiobooks, have long had the option to take them out of libraries instead. In fact, many libraries now offer digital downloads of audiobooks.

This indeed is the problem with Digital Rights Management. Traditionally, national laws require content owners to grant “fair use” rights for products consumers buy. This means that the buyer has to be allowed to make copies of the purchased audiobooks, in order to use them in car, in portable digital audio player, in laptop computer, etc.

Somehow DRM system needs to know when the copying is allowed and when not –as i.e. users have rights to make copies to their closest relatives, etc.

However this has been solved by allowing to copy the original file. But the copy of the original file cannot be copied any further. Obviously this also causes problems, if user deletes the original file, but still has the legal copy of the file

Book publishers need to realize that consumers will be more likely to purchase their product, not less, when it comes in a format they want.

Will Penguin come back? It is a matter of time ….

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