The New York Times published Say So Long to an Old Companion on the 28th of July.

The image above is the invitation from the audio department at Hachette for a party to mourn (read: celebrate) the passing of the cassette technology. Their final audiobook released on cassette was “Sail,” by James Patterson and Howard Roughan in June of 2008.

Cassettes held out far longer for audiobooks than music because they allow the listener to resume wherever they left off, in any device that supports a cassette (getting harder to find these). CDs took up about half of the audiobook market and digital download is already looking to surpass CDs in music.

This is great for me and the team, working on audiobook digital downloads. Developing software distribution allows an amazing amount of flexibility and ease of use. Digital allows us to resume where the customer left off (benefit of cassette), as well as provide a deeper connection through metadata and images. Through our Zip process, we help make it easy to put the audiobook on a device such as an iPod, WMA player, Windows Mobile or PalmOS phone.

Kind of like ice sublimation, audiobooks will sublimate directly to digital. No need to stop at a usurped physical media.

I wrote a quick note a few days ago about Roz Savage and her efforts to cross the Pacific Ocean on a row boat (she’s doing quite well and just wrote her day 39 entry). It’s an extremely cool adventure.

Since then I’ve been catching the daily entry on the blog at http://rozsavage.com/blog/.  Something pretty cool has surfaced in her writing, at least to me… Audiobooks! She’s got an iPod with 300+ audiobooks and has been commenting on them along the way (check out day 38, day 19, day 9, day 4, etc).

She’s generating podcasts with Leo Laporte as well.

At a startup you look forward to the day when people recognize your product and respond with positive words. At iofy we’ve received many many positive letters, thank you notes and feedback, but this is the first video we’ve found reviewing our audiobook chip product. It was entirely unsolicited.

Yesterday I asked the question, “Random House DRM-free a hoax?“ The question was based on Cory Doctorow’s post announcing a big move by Random House towards DRM-free MP3 audiobooks. The PDF on his site links to a letter by Madeline McIntosh detailing the move to Random House’s partners.

Since my post both Cory and Madeline have confirmed the validity of the letter. Thank you to both for following up and answering the question.

While it seems many are rejoicing over the supposed announcement of Random House going DRM-free, it also seems this could be hoax. BoingBoing, care of Cory Doctorow, brought the story to light. But something doesn’t smell right…

Don’t get me wrong – this would be groundbreaking and very fast for an industry that doesn’t usually take big risks. But there’s a lot bordering on the edge of too-good-to-be-true and not sitting right.

Cory Doctorow broke the story on BoingBoing.net, where he claims to have gotten hold of an announcement. The announcement isn’t available anywhere else on the net.

The content of the letter is downright mouth watering for folks looking forward to DRM-free content.

“The results: we have not yet found a single instance of the eMusic watermarked titles being distributed illegally.”

Seriously? Not a single one? Were there no sales? There will be piracy with any content. Everyone expects this. The issue is not whether it will happen or not, but whether DRM-free content leads to increased sales, increased profits, and increased customer love. The statement that not a single instance occurring is hard to swallow.

I’m not saying it’s a hoax – only that I’m looking forward to getting more facts and seeing how this plays out. I’ve written to Random House for comment but have not yet received a response.

UPDATE: Madeline McIntosh, Random House publisher and author of the letter, confirmed this morning via email that the letter is not a hoax (also confirmed in the comments below). This is exciting and game changing news in the audiobook industry.

As promised (but late as a post), we released iofy’s RESTful documentation. This is extremely exciting for both our development and management teams. We now have an open account management API enabling others to offer iofy’s account management and access to a customer’s digital libraries of downloaded audiobooks.

I’m proud of this accomplishment.

The iofy RESTful API covers the features for partner or reseller to offer downloadable audiobooks. These RESTful web services use standard REST calls, are language agnostic, retrieve RSS 2.0 feeds and enable:

• product listing and search
• account management
• financial management
• purchase and checkout

One can receive dynamic product feeds from ws.iofy.com/product/, where search parameters can include title, author, publisher, narrator, ISBN, and more. These feeds come complete with thumbnail image enclosures, MP3 audio sample enclosures, and all the metadata.

Via account management, described last week, customer accounts can be created, modified, password reset, and most importantly the customer’s prior purchases become available in a library. One can offer this digital library and account management solution without building it (or maintaining it). Just harness it.

The fulfillment API allows assignment of a digital download in a single call. We included PHP sample source code, but it could just as easily be harnessed in any other language.

JavaScript and PHP sample code is available which allows complete harnessing of both APIs. To learn more, email developer@iofy.com.

iofy td: RESTful API

iofy td: Fulfillment API

Audible is Apple’s provider for Audiobooks. Having Amazon, a primary competitor to Apple, pick up the company makes for some interesting times ahead of us. Will Apple continue to use Audible as its audio backbone? How about Amazon’s plans for Audible content and its distribution? What is the industry response? The conversations amongst my team and co-workers didn’t stray far from those questions yesterday.

And now today, with Microsoft finally taking the plunge and offering real money for Yahoo!, Inc, we’re in for some more great questions. Yahoo! has more users than any other service on the Internet. That part is interesting and you’ll see plenty of articles on the sale being all about Microsoft trying to compete with Google, but I’m more interested in Microsoft’s use of Yahoo! Music and their massive amount of users for that service.

Ian Rogers heads up Yahoo! Music and is accurate and honest about the direction the music industry is headed. If Ian’s views are as accurate as I think they are, and if the rumors of Yahoo! Music moving towards offering music for free are true, there are certainly more game changers coming.

I’m excited as hell for this to come true (if and when it comes true.) iofy corporation is a technology company which builds the backbones for delivering content. These changes are going to offer great opportunities for us as a small and agile company.

What a great way to end the week!