Cory Doctorow’s audiobook Kickstarter campaign pisses us off. It’s being billed as a campaign to take down Audible, Amazon’s audiobook arm. It is actually an independent audiobook marketing campaign disguised as part of the movement against monopolies like Amazon, restrictive Digital Rights Management (DRM), and copyright laws that increasingly serve large corporations rather than creators.

Doctorow tries to focus attention on Audible’s monopoly with gems like, “90 percent of [the] market for audiobooks is dominated by a single firm [Audible], and every title that is sold by that firm is locked forever to that firm’s ecosystem” (Interview). Sounds horrible, right?

Here’s what Doctorow is conveniently overlooking: if you cancel your Audible subscription, “any titles you purchase are yours to keep forever”—or until Audible goes out of business (Audible’s Help Center, accessed Oct. 3, 2020). Audible could not offer this guarantee to customers unless they contracted with authors for permanent access to audiobooks sold on their platform. While it might seem more fair to allow customers to keep purchases after an author leaves the platform, it makes sense on Audible’s end to want something for continuing to provide that access. Server space and streaming bandwidth ain’t free.

Doctorow also blithely ignores the considerable privilege that has enabled him to take a rather extreme position on copyright. He initially published his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, for free under a Creative Commons license that allowed readers to share and remix it. “So many of the writers I grew up idolizing or who mentored me ended their careers in real significant financial problems and really struggling artistically as well, that I would easily trade a little bit of money at the beginning for a long-term high-fidelity relationship with an audience at the other end of my career,” he says, seeming to completely miss that he was able to do this because he’s in an extremely privileged position (Interview). Most authors cannot afford to use this strategy.

While Doctorow does make some good points about flaws in copyright law and how much monopolies have come to dominate the marketplace, a Kickstarter campaign to independently produce an audiobook is not the way to change that. Electing lawmakers who will enforce anti-trust law and overhaul the copyright system in creators’ favor is. But that answer is much less appealing than, “Buy my audiobook to stick it to Amazon and other copyright and DRM-abusing corporations.”

So back the Kickstarter if you enjoy his books, but don’t expect it to have any meaningful impact on the law or the marketplace.