Friday, August 14, 2009

Penguin Removes Audiobooks From eMusic Shelves

It's been just over a month since eMusic, the second largest music store on the Web (and proud of it), launched their new audiobook store, and but the site's already encountering a pretty major stumbling block--Penguin Audio, one the first five major publishers to be distributed by the site, has pulled out, citing fears over potential piracy.

The move means that 150 titles will disappear from eMusic's eShelves.

Like eMusic's longstanding DRM-free approach to music, the store's audiobook catalog doesn't carry the same sort of restrictions as the selections carried by iTunes. "At this moment we're not going to have our titles on eMusic or with anyone else who sells non-DRM until the landscape shakes out and we feel very comfortable and confident that our titles will not be pirated," sPenguin Audio publisher, Dick Heffernan told The New York Times.

It's unclear why what seemed like a good deal initially is now a deal-breaker a mere month later, but Heffernan referred to the deal as a "experiment" that was subsequently rejected by his superiors.

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