I had heard of Audible a long time ago, but had never given it a try. A few weeks ago after listening to Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech and hearing about Audible’s offer for new subscribers I thought of testing it out. It was a 14-day trial with 2 books I could listen to for free. The first book I downloaded was Rework and the second one, a book I already own, Startup Nation.

There are a lot of upsides to listening to audiobooks. I’ve become so busy in the last few years that I seldom have any energy to read books anymore. It’s a real pity and something that I want to change when it becomes possible.

However with audiobooks, I’m able to listen to books when I’m in between meetings for example or simply walking to catch the bus. It’s great for this and I’ve realised I can devour quite a bit of them in this format.

Not all is sparkly and well however. While I very much like the concept and would like to keep subscribing, I find it hard mainly for two reasons: catalogue size and DRM.

Audible is probably the largest audiobook store online, but it still lacks a lot of choice. I read mostly, if not only, business books and having looked at their recent listings of business books I could not go on for paying something “just in case” they happened to come up with good content. I could have gone on for a month or two more to listen to the books they had in their catalogue that I’d want to read, but I couldn’t justify paying for it.

Secondly is the issue of DRM. Having launched OlenRikollinen – the largest anti-DRM (and copyright legislation renewal) movement in Finland during the previous decade I thought the problem of DRM would have gotten less annoying as years went on.

Unfortunately this wasn’t the case. I’m very much in love with the Nokia N900. It’s a kick ass phone, built on open source standards that enables developers to build cool stuff on it. Equally unfortunate is that Audible does not support the device with their native application, thus cutting out the usage of the device unless you work your way round the DRM.

I’ve listened to audiobooks and podcasts on the device with the great Panucci app. It runs an array of formats, but does not support the Audible format. This means I’ve literally had to strip the DRM from the files, as a paying customer, to be able to listen to my purchases the way I want. How did I do this? I listened to the audiobook in iTunes over night with the Mac muted, while Audio Hijack recorded the audio into an mp3-file.

So all in all, there’s a lot of good to like in Audible, but for the above mentioned issues of catalogue size and DRM – it’s not for me. At least for now.

Thanks Audible, it was fun while it lasted.