We’re still not sure what is going on here, but I have a similar report from a friend, and Hickey found a 4-month-old forum post which appeared to confirm his findings. I thought maybe that was because it was a freebie, so I tried the Sherlock Holmes books. Just out of interest I thought I’d download the file - if nothing else, I could store the encrypted file until such time as someone *did* write software to crack the encryption.īeing me, I thought “well, as long as I’ve downloaded it, I might as well just see what happens if I try playing it in VLC” - the filename was ARareBookofCunningDeviceUnabridged_mp3.aa, so I thought it *might* be just a wrapper round an MP3 file, though that didn’t seem likely given what I know about Audible’s DRM practices. So I got it, and went to the Library section of the Audible website to see how to listen to it in the browser. It came out yesterday, and is Audible-only (get it here), I got it because I quite like the Rivers books, and I can always listen to it in my web browser, because it’s only twenty-nine minutes, and I’m not going to complain too much about free (to quote from Nez’s Infinite Tuesday, which I reviewed yesterday, “never complain about the air conditioning on a private jet”). Today, while looking through the comments on File770, I noticed someone linking to a free audiobook short story by Ben Aaronovitch, part of his Rivers of London series.

Windows and macOS users downloaded a DRMed AAX file, but when Hickey was browsing the web from a Linux system, he was offered a DRM-free AA file. It used to be that you could strip Audible DRM by paying for a $30 app or by running the right python script, but now there may be a simpler option.Īndrew Hickey noticed a couple weeks back that Audible gave you different versions of an audiobook based on which OS you were using.

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