Digital rights management has been a pickle for a lot of digital download services. Why did Audible decide to handle that by developing its own file format?
When we started working on this in 1995, digital rights management wasn't even in the lexicon. Neither was MP3. We did it because I made my living through my writing for 20 years, and I saw this as a tremendous channel for distribution for the creative class. But it probably couldn't exist if there wasn't some way to have people pay for the content. We invented it out of necessity.
We just always figured we'd need to invent on behalf of the consumer as well as the intellectual-property rights holder. The Audible format made that content much more usable than some of the DRM schemes invented by music rights holders who didn't really ever want this to happen. We were always ready to adopt a superior platform; it's just that no one ever made one.
Is your main challenge now a behavioural one -- getting people to think about their gadget of choice as more than a music player?
Communicating to the people getting these devices is a classic challenge, and we're attacking that in a lot of ways. Devices coming out from Rio and Creative come with all sorts of Audible offers; we have deals with retailers like Amazon.
Once you can engage people enough to ask a basic question -- 'do you have enough time to read everything you want to read?' -- it's a pretty quick sell. Everybody says "no." Everybody has aspirations to consume more than they have time for. Then the testimonials of Audible customers knocking off three or four books a month, simply because they use the time they're stuck in traffic or working out on a StairMaster, pretty much seals the case.
Speech synthesis technology keeps improving -- do you worry about there being a time when people won't need to pay for someone to read The New York Times to them, because a machine will do it for them?
I'm as much of a futurist as anyone when it comes to having faith in technology moving forward, but I can't think of any technology that's advanced slower than text-to-speech technology. From a consumer standpoint, the difference between DecTalk, which came out something like 19 years ago, and the latest technology is very small. It's very complicated technology, and you need massive processing power to get anything like a reading experience that's palatable for more than very short periods of time.
One last question I have to ask, even though it's in your FAQ. Why no Harry Potter books?
Five years ago, the issue was that we had no Tom Clancy. It's just a process with certain big authors you have to work on. I'm always hopeful. But in that particular case, there are some fears of technology that we need to keep working to address. In this realm, Harry Potter is about the only thing you see significantly pirated. The rest of the stuff, people are really happy to get from us.
I hear Steve Jobs saying what I've been saying for a long time, which is that the realm of piracy will diminish most profoundly when the consumer perceives a great product at great prices from good people with well-meaning aspirations. There's a real relationship between the content offered by services like iTunes and Audible and the diminishing piracy in those areas.
