If you are an author who has written one or more books, eventually you may consider creating an audio cd book from your manuscript.
If so, how susceptible will you be to pirates ripping off your audio cd books for their own gain? In other words, can you copy protect your audio cd book?
Regardless of what anyone tells you, it is impossible to completely protect an audio cd book using technology. At best, you can make it more difficult to copy, but there is no way to make it impossible. Therefore, your goal should be to "discourage" copying, not prevent it entirely.
Probably of greater concern to you is audio cd book counterfeiting. If your book become a best seller, it is almost guaranteed that professional counterfeiters will target your book. One of the worst offenders is China. And if you go to online auction sites, you'll find may audio cd books being auctioned at prices so low, that you wonder how the seller can make a profit. The answer, of course, is that many of these cds are counterfeit.
One way of protecting your audio cd book is to have your production company place holograms on your cds. Most counterfeiters will either not be able to or will not want to eat the cost of replicating the hologram.
Other audio cd books are loaded with anti-copying protections that prevent anyone from making a digital copy of it. However, there are two downsides to this method.
1. You may encounter a customer backlash because they are unable to make a copy of the audio cd book.
2. Your customer support cost is just about guaranteed to increase as customers email or call your company because of an inability to make copy.
There is no simple answer to the audio cd book copy protection problem. For now, it probably best to take a philosophical approach and realize just as some people will Xerox the contents of your hard copy book, some will also make illegitimate copies of your audio cd book.
