The strange thing for me is the way Amazon use the DRM free status of their music as a major selling point, while maintaining their DRM crippled audiobook brand. Glad to see Comixology starting to travel towards freedom.
DRM free only applies to a few titles. i.e. from Image which is DRM free on the Image store. They are just matching their competitors. Marvel titles are still using DRM. I don’t own any DC titles on Comixology so I don’t know about them.
It is a nice move as I really like the Comixology viewer on my tablet. The few comix I own elsewhere are much harder to read.
I think part of the problem is that they acquired audible, didn’t they? It’s likely that there’s pre-existing contracts, but as a business Amazon is pretty decent about DRM options (pushing the music and now Comixology) so I’d expect to see some DRM-free audiobooks once more folks start demanding them.
I think they acquired Audible long enough ago that they could have re-negotiated those contracts by now if they wanted to. Reading what Cory’s said in the past though they’re adamant that they won’t let him open the floodgates by having a DRM-free version of Little Brother on their site.
There are DRM-free ebooks, but that generally seems to be driven by publishers rather than Amazon. The music is the odd one out, where the DRM-free status was a specific attempt to bash Apple.
That’s probably fair - let’s remember that Cory, while he’s great, isn’t exactly one of the big publishers and his request is going to carry significantly less weight. Hopefully more and more users and publishers start demanding the ability to publish audiobooks.
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