Simply Audiobooks — an excellent audiobook retailer in Toronto — has launched an online store selling all of Random House’s DRM-free downloadable titles. Random House is one of the many audiobook publishers that wants to give up on DRM, but they’ve been thrwarted by Audible (the exclusive supplier of audiobook downloads to Amazon and the iTunes Store) because the company won’t sell DRM-free titles even when the publisher and author wish to make their work available without technological restrictions. The good news is that DRM-free formats are much easier to sell and support, which is clearing the way for new entrants into the marketplace like Simply Audiobooks and Zipidee, to compete with Audible.]]>
Naxos produces fantastic, professionally read audiobooks of contemporary and classic lit — and they distribute them on CD and as DRM-free, watermark-free MP3s. Basically, this is a company that assumes you’re a valued customer, not a dirty thief. They’re pioneers in the growing field of DRM-free audiobook providers, who, unlike market-leader Audible (a division of Amazon) allow publishers and writers to decide whether or not they want to their books crippled with DRM.]]>
My literary agent wrote to me this morning to tell me about a letter his agency just received from Blackstone Audio, one of the largest audiobook publishers in the world, announcing that Blackstone was phasing out its use of DRM. Blackstone is contacting the rightsholders for all its titles notifying them that they’ll be releasing their catalog in DRM-free MP3]]>
June 16, 2008 (Computerworld) What if half the men in science, engineering and technology roles dropped out at midcareer? That would surely be perceived as a national crisis. Yet more than half the women in those fields leave — most of them during their mid- to late 30s.]]>In this month’s Harvard Business Review, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Carolyn Buck Luce and Lisa J. Servon describe the Athena Factor, their research project examining the career trajectories of such women. Hewlett, founding president of the Center for Work-Life Policy in New York, told Kathleen Melymuka about what they learned.
A look at where Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain stand on a selection of issues as they go head-to-head for the presidency]]>
An Ohio Democratic lawmaker and former presidential candidate has presented articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush to Congress.]]>Thirty-five articles were presented by Rep. Dennis Kucinich to the House of Representatives late Monday evening, airing live on C-SPAN.
Congressman Dennis Kucinich is on the floor of the House of Representatives right now introducing 35 articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush.]]>
The Human Rights Tribune is reporting that the US has pulled out of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, “an international body within the United Nations System. Its stated purpose is to address human rights violations.”
This doesn’t sound good.
]]>]]>John McCain has changed his position on illegal warrantless wiretapping: he used to think that the President had to uphold the nation’s laws. Now he says that the Constitution is subordinate to the all-powerful executive order.
My favorite line on this comes from the chickenhawks who say that the Fourth Amendment was written before the All Powerful Threat of Terrorism. Sure thing. Ben Franklin and his pals couldn’t possibly have foreseen a world in which the very idea of America was under some kind of military threat. Those candyasses didn’t understand what war was about. They were armchair theorists, civilians who’d never anticipated foreign soldiers on American soil — surely if they’d known that America might some day face an actual existential risk, they would have put a little asterisk next to each clause of the Bill of Rights leading to a footnote that said, “Unless the king president really, really needs to do it.”