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The New York Times says that iTunes competitor eMusic will begin selling audio books tomorrow.  More than a thousand downloadable books are expected to be offered with many of them costing far less than on iTunes. 

For example, “The Audacity of Hope,” read by author Barack Obama, will cost $9.99 on eMusic compared with $18.95 on iTunes.  The retail price for a five-CD version of the same book is $29.95.

The biggest selling point for eMusic is also its biggest point of controversy: the fact that the site, which uses the MP3 format, lacks digital rights management technology that protects copyrighted material from unlimited duplication, says the NY Times.  Because of the lack of piracy protection, no major music label has signed on with eMusic.  Despite that, the site is very popular, second only to iTunes in music download sales.

Apparently some audio book publishers are willing to give the site a try.  Random House Audio, for example, will be selling about 500 titles, roughly 20 percent of its catalog, through eMusic. “We’re very interested in testing this, but we didn’t think it was appropriate to put all of our titles in a test program,” said Madeline McIntosh, the group’s publisher.  Others publishers demur. 

David Pakman of eMusic said that his company’s expansion into audiobooks signaled growing acceptance of the easy-to-copy MP3 format in general.

“Here you have Random House, the largest publisher in the U.S., taking part in this,” Mr. Pakman said, noting that Random House’s parent company, Bertelsmann, also owns BMG Music. “What they’re doing is prioritizing the need for sales and growing the market share over copy protection. It speaks to the larger trend that media companies are now getting comfortable with something they probably should have done seven or eight years ago.”

See the NY Times article for more details.  [via LibraryStuff]