> If another company offers you a better deal for your creative work and you switch, your audience can't follow you to the new company without giving up all the audiobooks they've bought to date. That's a lot to ask of listeners!
It's not the original copies of your content that are locked forever: it's the copies that Audible has sold to your readers.
I'd like to see it as compulsory (if I pay for format X eg audio, I should have a right to it on any platform). But there is no law that says an author etc cannot give away otherwise legal copies...
There are a few methods, and none of them are great:
1. You include an access key in the content of your audiobook. This means your listeners hear an ad for the thing they already own. It also means providing a single global access key to your book (accessible by everyone), unless you convince Audible/Amazon to give every customer a different audio file (with a unique product key).
2. You coordinate with Audible/Amazon to have them send their customers an email with special access to your DRM-free copy (read: competition). Good luck.
3. You get Audible/Amazon to send their customers' email address to you, so you can send them a link to your DRM-free copy. Same as #2, but with a privacy violation.
>This means that when you sell your audiobooks on Audible, you lock them to Audible's platform...forever. 9/
This seems to be untrue. You selling elsewhere does not give anyone the ability to bypass DRM does it?!