Audible.com & Hercule Poirot

I have been on a Poirot fad lately, trying to read all the books or watch all the films. Dean introduced me to it because Agatha Christie is one of his favorite authors. When I get on kicks like this, I tend to read or watch as much as I can, as quickly as I can, before some other thing interests me and I switch.

Now, there are three problems with reading these books.
(1) There are a lot of books to read and movies to watch
(2) Many of the books have multiple titles. So, every time I find a book, I have to read the cover carefully to try to figure out if it is one I have already read. And, since Christie sometimes repeats plot elements (e.g. several plots feature the sleeping drug Verinol or suspects from South America), it can sometimes be tricky.
(3) I prefer to listen to the books on audio. There's just something to these books that makes audio the perfect format. The problem is, most audio that I find in the used bookstores are tapes instead of CD. So, I decided to sign up with Audible.com and download the books in Mp3 format to listen in my car stereo, which is also an MP3 player.

Now audible.com is about half the price of retail. The problem is the darn copy protection! Audible.com advertises that it has books in mp3 format, but actually they have a proprietary format called ".aa" format. It's designed to be listened to on an iPod, PC/iTunes, or certain portable MP3 players that work with its copy protection, and the proprietary format is not compatible with all devices.

Particularly, I want to listen to the books by burning it to a CD and listening it in my Jensen car stereo, which is an MP3 player. BUT ... my car stereo doesn't recognize the proprietary .aa format, and audible.com doesn't support Jensen car stereo MP3 players. And iTunes refuses to convert the .aa format to a standard .mp3 format because of the copy protection. So I can't listen to the books in my car.

It's very frustrating. It's like buying a DVD only to find that it doesn't work in your particular DVD player. Or buying a book and discovering that it's written in another language. Copy protection, as a concept, is not a problem to me, but when it keeps me from enjoying the things that I legitimately bought, it is a problem.

I ended up solving the problem by getting some software that circumvents the copy protection and converts the audio book from .aa to a regular .mp3 format. Normally I would frown on that sort of thing -- but since I bought these audio books legitimately, in what audible.com advertised as being an MP3 format, and since audible.com doesn't provide any legitimate way for me to listen to the books in my car's MP3 player, I don't really see any ethical problem with converting it and using it for my own personal use.