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Look here, I have money in my pocket. I’m willing to share it with authors and publishers, in exchange for their works.

I’ve been walking to work, 40 or 50 minutes, because of the snow. I thought it might be nice to listen to an audiobook while I was doing it. So I had a bit of a browse, and it seems the place to get them downloaded from is audible.co.uk. It’s illegal to rip CDs in the UK (This BBC article is the newest info I could find on it, if anyone else knows anything more I’d be grateful) so I can’t purchase a CD of the book I wanted and rip it to listen to on my phone. I foolishly purchased a copy of the book from audible.co.uk and tried to download it to my phone only to find out the audio format was not something my phone could read – and don’t get me wrong, my phone supports quite a few audio formats! They have software that allows you to transfer the book to mobile devices, but not for Android. I could burn it to CD and then rip it into a non-proprietary audio format, but as I said earlier, that’s not legal.

The biggest mistake I made was to assume that the book would be in a commonly supported audio format before purchasing, believing statements on the audible site like “Chances are if you have a mobile audio device, it’s compatible with Audible”. It’s nice that they use software to enforce “honesty” on behalf of their consumers without quite managing it themselves. (They do have a list of compatible devices, but with a statement like that it seems silly to double-check that they support a rapidly expanding mobile OS like Android!)

If you Google “dragon keeper audio book torrent”, you’ll quickly find what you want, in .mp3 format. It seems such a shame that copyright management only harms people trying to deal legally and fairly with the publisher. I don’t think I’ll be attempting to purchase an e-book or audio book any time in the near future. I’m calling my “purchase” of this book a waste of money and leaving it at that. I won’t download the torrent, even though it seems ridiculously unfair. But seriously, do you wonder WHY people pirate things when honest consumers are treated like criminals already?