Now That Amazon Is Offering Auto-Rip Of CDs You Bought, Will It Do The Same For Books?

from the why-not? dept

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Times change. Amazon is making some news by launching an auto-rip service that puts MP3 copies of songs into your Amazon cloud storage when you buy CDs. Some have been comparing this to the old MP3.com "Beam It!" service that got MP3.com sued out of existence a while back, but this is quite different on one key dimension: Amazon has licensing deals with the major labels which specifically allow this (which also means it doesn't work on all CDs).Still, this move does raise some interesting question. For example: why not do this for books too ? Why not have it so that when you buy a physical book, a digital copy automatically shows up on your Kindle? Of course, the real answer isn't difficult to glean: because the publishers have no interest at all in doing this (yet). I expect they'll do it eventually, but the publishers are still going through the same denial phase that many in the recording business went through earlier, and so it's probably still going to be at least a year before some publisher comes around to such a deal (and then it will be announced as "big news" when it happens).Another interesting question is whether or not the "AutoRip" service leads to more resells of CDs soon after people buy them. As Sherwin Siy notes, it may not actually be different than buying a CD and ripping it yourself, but the automated nature of it may make it easier to simply pass on the CD. Of course, does that mean you're legally supposed to delete the MP3s too? I'm sure the industry would argue that's the case, but it might not be that clear cut.In the end, this really is the kind of thing that the recording industryembraced a decade ago, so welcome to the party (a bit late).

Filed Under: autorip, books, digital copies, licenses, music

Companies: amazon