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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is their biggest problem. Libro.fm is selling their audiobooks at what appears to be some kind of absurd MSRP.

Audible offers audiobooks at that price point too, but you'd have to be an idiot to pay it. Amazon will sell you the Audible version of a book you've purchased the Kindle version of at a steep discount. So steep that purchasing the ebook+audiobook is cheaper than purchasing the audiobook by itself.

Compare the pricing for All Creatures Great and Small, which is atypical mostly in that the combined-purchase discount is unusually stingy:

Libro.fm: $37.94

Audible: $29.99

Kindle+Audible: $17.48

I don't like buying DRMed audiobooks, but it's not that hard to justify at $2.99.

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Their prices is one problem, being completely unable to post a book at the price is another.

It's also worth noting that making audiobooks is very labor intensive, and Amazon/Audible can offer some of their prices only via the economies of scale. It's also possible that they're offering books at a loss to push out other audiobook sellers - an extension of their efforts with exclusives.

> making audiobooks is very labor intensive

I don't think it's any way close to writing a book first. But books are priced way cheaper for some reason.

A 10 hour audiobook (which is about 90k words) requires:

- About 20 hours of a voice actor's time

- About 40 hours of a sound engineer's time

- About 30 hours of a director's time

Plus recording booth facilities. Some basic Googling puts the actual cost in excess of $200 per finished hour of recording.

Books have a broader distribution than audiobooks, on an order of magnitude (or two) scale. That's the primary reason why they're inexpensive. Audiobooks are still a bit of a niche market, though Audible/Amazon are doing a lot to increase the size of the market.

EDIT: I did a bit of research, and it seems like freelance writers can earn between $0.02 to $0.20 per word, which for a 90k novel works out to up to $18,000; less than the finished audio book. Take that how you will.

>A 10 hour audiobook (which is about 90k words) requires

I don't think that word means what you think it means. It's completely possible for an author to record their own audiobook in professional quality audio with a fairly minimal investment. If they don't have a good narration voice then that's going to hurt them, but it can all be done by the author themselves at no extra cost apart from their time, a decent microphone, a computer, and a quiet place to record.

How does the adage go: a professional will cost you less than DIY, for the same quality of work. For all intents and purposes, yes, an author is completely capable of recording their own audio book.

But - and this is a big but - it's most likely going to sound pretty bad. It will have a small dynamic range (lack of an audio booth and quality microphone), the quality of the various voices will typically be poor (voice acting), there will be essess and 'plosions all over (pop screens, high pass filters, de-essing filters), there will be volume and tone changes where fixes are cut in (voice acting experience), and in the worst cases there will be background noises throughout (recording space and post-processing).

It could also take them between 2x and 10x as long - time where they aren't writing - since they don't have the experience required to do efficiently record, edit, and clean up their work.

I've recently been listening to fan narrations of light novels, and these are the kinds of problems that crop up all over these fan works. I don't mind in these cases, because they're free.

You can hire a professional to record an audiobook for $200-$300 per finished hour all in cost, there are some cheaper rates available. A 90k word book, should be about 7.5 hours since the usual reading pace is about 12k words per hour. Recording the audiobook should be about $1500, and you'll need to pay for cover art rights and some modest design work. All in production costs for audible of about $2k.

Unless you can strip the DRM, you're not buying.

I don't think most audiobook listeners care about this distinction enough to overcome the price difference.

Until all their "purchased" books get into the DRM graveyard because in fact they did not purchase anything.

I lost access to all my "purchased" Amazon Kindle books when they blocked my account and no amount of calls and explaining allowed me to at least get my "purchased" content. Since then I created r/drmgraveyard to follow up the dead of DRM encumbered services.

The curse is that, like targeted social engineering, it doesn't happen to enough people enough of the time to change behavior.

How many people use Steam knowing and caring that you can't enter offline mode to play your games unless you connect to the internet every month?

It's actually quite easy to strip the DRM on Audible using ffmpeg - which I do to keep an archive of all my purchases.

There's a script on github to get the encryption key for your account by letting it sign in for you.

Then from there it's easy to get ffmpeg to turn the DRM aac to a mp3

Is this legal? I sort of assume it isn't, in which case why bother? It seems faster/easier just to pirate from the get go.

> It seems faster/easier just to pirate from the get go

Then the author doesn't get paid. That's the difference; buying an encumbered file and removing the encumbrance still pays the creator.

Why not borrow audiobooks from a local library?

I do, but that's the point of the article, that Amazon/Audible exclusives are not available to libraries for electronic lending.

At that point, a prospective customer has two choices: Not buy (which is the choice I largely make), or buy from the sole source and remove the DRM.

> Then the author doesn't get paid.

The creator presumably gets a very small cut. If you want to pay the creator, why not send the full price, or some amount, directly to them?! I'm sure they would appreciate that.

Copyright infringement is generally a criminal act if the act of copying provides an expectation of any type of monetary gain, where monetary is broadly defined to be anything of value [1][2].

So removing the DRM on something that you already have a license to consume? Not a copyright infringement crime. Sending a copy of the DRM free product to a friend who hasn't bought a copyrighted version? Yes a copyright infringement crime. Removing the DRM that limits your ability to consume the product unless you buy a specially licensed version of the product, when you haven't paid for it, yes a copyright crime.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Electronic_Theft_Act

Removing the DRM is a DMCA violation though, even if you have no intent to distribute. The doctrine of first sale was gutted for digital content because Congress is in the pocket of big companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

When the Learning Disabilities Association complained that the DMCA prohibited people with disabilities from removing DRM to enable their products to work with assistive tools, no change was made to the law as it was deemed the law does not prohibit DRM removal in this case. The Entertainment Software Association stated [1]:

> In addition, DIYAbility’s initial comments do not provide sufficient information to know whether what it would like to do would actually violate Section 1201, rather than, for example, being permitted by Section 1201(f).

Here's a link to section 1201(f) of the Circumvention of copyright protection systems references reverse engineering [2].

[1] https://www.regulations.gov/contentStreamer?documentId=COLC-...

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

So you won’t know until the MPAA is suing you for a trillion dollars because you wanted to watch your DVD on your phone.

> It seems faster/easier just to pirate from the get go.

Others have pointed out that authors won't get paid that way. But I also disagree that it is faster or easier to pirate. First you have to have a decent source (or multiple sources) to search for the books, hope that they are decent enough quality, hope that they have enough peers that you don't have to wait a day to download the book, etc. By contrast, on Audible you press one button to buy and another to download. Even when you take into account any DRM removal, the necessary time and effort are much lower.

I don't consume audio books so I certainly don't pirate them but most of the cost of piracy is frontloaded into 5-10 minutes finding a decent resource and then is as easy to use as any other resource.

This actually mirrors the time where someone who was interested in audiobooks would take to find a source to shop for audiobooks, create an account, confirm the email validation, enter payment info and start buying.

As a test I entered stephen king audiobook into my torrent client's built in search engine and got 210 results any of which can be added with a click. The worlds most well known piracy site is even better listing a torrent with 70 people with 68 different audio books by king among many other torrents.

Piracy is trivial enough a 7 year old can do it.

In England: format shifting isn't a criminal offence (unless you do enough of it to affect business, or you do it as part of a business). The rights holders could sue to recover the cost of the media, but it's confusing what that would be. It keeps going into and out of law -- sometimes it's allowed, sometimes forbidden. I have no idea what the status is now. There's potentially something there about circumventing a technical measure, but again that's not a criminal offence.

There are exceptions if you're making something accessible.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/107

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Is there a tutorial on how to do this somewhere... I’ve got 5 or 6 audible books I’d like to backup.

You can use this to get your activation bytes from Audible servers:

https://github.com/inAudible-NG/audible-activator

Or this, to crack the activation bytes in an existing .aax file, offline:

https://github.com/inAudible-NG/tables

Both methods are easy. It's then a case of using FFmpeg with an -activation_bytes parameter to convert to MP3 or whatever (or just remux into an M4A/M4B without transcoding). Tutorial here:

https://www.kylepiira.com/2019/05/12/how-to-break-audible-dr...

There are a bunch of other tools (both commercial and free) which use the above techniques but add either a nice CLI or GUI. The original was Inaudible itself, which can be found on your favourite torrenting site. Alternatively you can grab it from here, but I'm not sure how up-to-date it is:

https://github.com/rmcrackan/inAudible

inAudible works quite well, it turns out.

If you listen regularly, the Audible membership is even better... $23/month for two books, and 30% off on everything past that. So that can get the per book cost down to under $12

Looks like Libro.fm has a similar subscription service, although it's $15/month for one book. This isn't all that shocking that it's a bit more expensive than Amazon. Hard to beat them on price.

You can set it up so your local bookstore gets a kickback from Libro.fm, too.

And if you pay for the year up front, it's even cheaper. (Actually, I think the 1st year offer for 12 audio books is a better deal than that too.)

I really hate their dark-pattern of holding your credits hostage if you want to pause your account. I have like 10 credits that I don't want to spend right now, I'm backed up and hardly reading and I can't pause my Audible membership that's $24/mo without losing my credits. I also don't want to be rushed to pick out 10 books and possibly waste my credits so I can pause. I'm VERY picky about what books I burn a credit on.

It's a really crappy way of keeping me tied in and I want to make sure people know about it.

Same. But I let my credits go to waste and will just never be a member again. Not gonna reward their stupid behavior.

You can convert your membership into the "Silver Plan", which charges you every other month. This way you're paying a bit less.

However, their silver plan is very hidden away and is only presented as an option when you go to cancel your account. And even then it might not work and you'll have to write to Customer Care to switch.

Oh interesting. Thanks for pointing that out. I'll check that out.

Your membership to Libro.fm gets you one token per month at $15. You can get any audiobook you want with this token. Then any additional audiobooks for the month get you a 30% discount off MSRP

It's not that bad, honestly, when compared to Audible which also limits you to one a month + discounted price for additional

$15 is still several times more than Amazon charges.

Unless by "several" you mean 1.25, then no, it's not.

Looks like they've raised prices since I last looked. But even at the higher prices, $15 is fully twice as much as Amazon charges, not 1.25x.

Amazon (Audible) charges $14.95 per month giving you one token / audiobook a month. They're the same price!

Perhaps they have accepted that consumers will not notice the DRM encumbrance, and are selling to libraries? The post mentions libraries quite a bit, although I'm not clear about the relevant licensing terms when audiobooks are sold to libraries.

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