Category: Audiobooks

Random House DRM-free a hoax?

Posted on by Sol Young with 8 Comments

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.

Posted in Audiobooks, Blogging, Prediction

RESTful Documentation

Posted on by Sol Young with Leave a comment

iofy

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

Posted in Audiobooks, iofy, Managing, Software Development, Web Services

A merger sort of week

Posted on by Sol Young with Leave a comment

msft-yhoo-amzn-adbl.jpgWow, what a week to be in the media industry. Yesterday with Amazon picking up Audible, and today with Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo!. It’s consolidation-for-growth time.

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!

Posted in Audiobooks, iofy