100 Million Ipods: A Sad Day For Libraries?

Last week over on LibraryPlanet.com Michael Pate wrote about the 100 Millionth iPod and how it relates to libraries. He's written about this issue before several times, and he says the stumbling block [to integrate them into library services] is not the audiobook vendors themselves, but the publishers. He says some publishers have hated Libraries for a long time because every time someone reads a book from us, that is one less sale. They would much rather sell books for iPods through Audible directly to consumers and cut libraries out of the equation entirely. He says that when and if everyone realizes that DRM is not a solution, we will all benefit. But as long as too many business are desperately trying to protect business models they don't even understand, we are going to just have to do the best we can.