Yeah, used to be a big Audible fan when I was in China, but no longer after I lost all my books when I switched computers. Serious BS.

Found this post while searching around and I thought I'd jump in here. I'm a big fan of both TWIT and Audible, I've actually been an Audible premium subscriber for over two years now and I love it.

In my opinion, the Audible DRM is probably the best DRM model I've seen, not that I wouldn't love to get rid of it, but they've done a good job.

The things I like about it is that while it can be a pain to deactivate and activate devices they're very good at helping you if you need it. I had both a computer and a PDA go down last year and I didn't have any activations left and no way of deactivating my broken devices, one email to Audible and they had reset everything.

The DRM plays well with almost everything, both Windows Media Player and iTunes; both PlayForSure and the iPod line. The only major exception right now is the Zune, but hopefully MS will get that working soon.

Finally, it's not actually that difficult to get past the DRM, you can go the brute force method of writing out to CDs and ripping them back in, or I've seen people get around it with TuneBite pretty easily.

But even if the DRM was way worse I'd still use Audible because I've never found a comparable service. Actually, I think I've gotten a better education for $22 a month with Audible than I'm getting for my four $60,000 BFA at the university (but don't tell them I said that).

I found this post while searching for TWiT's list of Audible recommendations. I don't have one of the DRM capable devices that Audible supports. What I do have is the Nero suite. Nero & Audible play well together. I download an audio book, burn it to virtual CDs (creates an ISO-like file for each CD which can later be mounted on Nero's virtual drive). Then I use Nero to rip the "CDs" to playable tracks. No DRM. I can choose where to play them. It's working for me.