Why None of my Books Are Available on Audible:

And Why Amazon Owes Me $3,218.55

by Cory Doctorow

So now there is one Cory Doctorow audio book on Audible, and it's all about how Audible screws over writers, publishers, audio book narrators, and customers.

You can read the text here. https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/

You can listen to Cory read it here. https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_431/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_431_-_Why_none_of_my_books_are_available_on_Audible.mp3 It starts at 4:26. This is the latest episode of the Cory Doctorow podcast, so there is other stuff too.

It is now available as an ebook for Kindle for $0.98 (presumably with DRM) on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B5RWTPR7/

And, finally, the audio of Cory reading it is now available on Audible (definitely with DRM). https://www.audible.com/pd/B0B7KH8KSD

In 2011, I gave a speech at Berlin's Chaos Communications Congress called "The Coming War on General Purpose Computing." In it, I explained that Digital Rights Management was technologically incoherent, a bizarre fantasy in which untrusted users of computers could be given encrypted files and all the tools needed to decrypt them, but somehow be prevented from using those decrypted files in ways that conflicted with the preferences of the company that supplied those files:\
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https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/\
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As I said then, computers are stubbornly, inescapably "general purpose." The only computer we know how to make – the Turing-complete von Neumann machine – is the computer that can run all the programs we know how to write. When someone claims to have built a computer-powered "appliance" – say, a smart speaker or (God help us all) a smart toaster – that can only run certain programs, what they mean is that they've designed a computer that can run every program, but which will refuse to run programs unless the manufacturer approves them.

BTW, here's the RSS feed for the Cory Doctorow podcast. https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

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