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Originally Posted by ApK
This will almost certainly drive more people to pirated sources who would never have had any reason to bother before, and it will not dissuade actual pirates, so that's sure not a ligitimate reason even if they come out and say it is.
I hadn't considered that motive. I was trying to figure out how they were monetizing this. The only other legitimate motive I could think of is reducing the costs associated with maintaining two platforms.
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Audible was concerned about unauthorized sharing of audios so making the files larger and in a new format would make it literally impossible to download them to a computer to reformat and transfer to a different player.
I used a program to do this after I had lost a number of them when I changed computers. They were books I returned to Audible so there wasn't a copy on my account to transfer to the new hard drive. I was able to download those left in my account to my new computer but I did this so that wouldn't happen again.
I think Overdrive probably has the same motive and by having them on our phones, they can track how we use them much easier.
It was less complicated to make copies of the MP3 files from Overdrive for Windows and save them. Many people often copied audio books on to their computers when they wanted to finish listening to the book if they weren't able to finish listening before the due date and couldn't renew them again.
It wasn't exactly proper to do this but many would delete the files when they had finished them and weren't involved in selling them to others.
It just seems worse for the public libraries to have to cut patrons' access off and is contrary to what libraries are meant to do, be a resource for those in the community who can't afford a lot of fancy electronics IMHO
The problem with the technology changing so often, it leaves more people on the outside looking in. I looked at a new Walkman with bluetooth capabilities that I could use to check out and listen to audiobooks and it was over $1,500! Very frustrating.