Penguin audiobooks to be copyright-free

Penguin is planning to offer audiobooks that are free of digital copyright protection technology, which will allow buyers to play them on any digital device, dismissing fears that they could become the latest target for online pirates.

The 73-year-old publishing house is also hoping for a big boost this year after one of its three-year-old titles, a new age self-improvement tome entitled A New Earth: Awakening to your Life's Purpose, was picked by Oprah Winfrey for her book club. Since the TV host chose it four weeks ago, Penguin has sent 4m copies to US retailers of a book that had sold 500,000.
Announcing a strong set of annual results from Pearson, which also owns the Financial Times, chief executive Marjorie Scardino said yesterday that Penguin would follow Random House and experiment with selling "DRM-free" digital versions of its audiobooks on the internet.
Though she said it was vital to protect intellectual property, "I don't think we can be worried about every incursion from electronic selling and electronic use. We have got to think about what the future is going to be and look at how to experiment with it."

Scardino admitted that another potential electronic version of literature - digital books or ebooks - has yet to take off because there is still no attractive digital book-reading device.
Last year Amazon tried to revitalise the market with the Kindle, but Scardino reckons it "is not quite there yet, and I think we are still waiting for that piece of kit. It's like downloadable music - iTunes came first but without the iPod I think that would not have really mattered."

Pearson announced profits of £549m for last year, up from £502m in 2006, as revenues increased to £4.2bn from £4bn and margins improved across the business. Penguin increased sales by 3% to £846m while profits leapt 20% to £74m helped by the success of titles including A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini and Don't Stop Me Now by Jeremy Clarkson. Former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan's book The Age of Turbulence sold almost a million copies.

Shares in Pearson dropped 17.5p to 648.5p as analysts fretted about its exposure to a weakening US economy. But Scardino stressed that most US educational spending is controlled by states, not the federal government, and it has not seen book budgets cut in previous economic downturns.
Pearson's FT Publishing business, which includes the Financial Times, FT.com and Mergermarket, increased sales by 12% to £344m with profits of £56m, up from £27m.
Scardino said the FT has seen no drop-off in advertising despite the credit crunch and major job losses at City banks. "We are up in the first few months of the year," she said. "We have lots of forward bookings so we are very positive."