In between posts, I have been looking to secure a full-time writing gig. One prospect would have me doing a lot of writing for packaging and documentation. So, I've been paying more attention to how boxes and labels and snipes and such communicate.

In my meanderings, I ran across the Play-Away Audio Book Player at my massive neighborhood Barnes and Noble.

It's a digital audiobook player complete with headphones and lanyard for jaunty 'round-the-neck wear. It has simple controls, no apparent moving parts and contains an entire unabridged book on its internal Flash-based memory chip.

I thought it was a clever idea until I saw that the book is permanently linked to the player. You can’t tell from the packaging, but you can send the player back for a 50% discount on your next book (so my next Danielle Steele purchase would only set me back $25 bucks or so). This discounted swapping scheme may be outlined in the product documentation, but it took three clicks at playawaydigital.com to learn about it online.

So it would be like buying a single book at the bookstore, then selling it back to the bookstore for a credit on your next book. The problem is, if you choose to keep the book (as lots of people do), then you’re forced to pay full price for the next book you buy.

So based on what I see on the outside of the package, there’s no online content distribution, the content is physically locked to its player and requires the purchase of a new content/player combo whenever you want a new title. It's no-moving-parts interface is simple, but looks a little chintzy for a $50 purchase

It could have been none with a sim card that was coded to the individual unit to ensure DRM stayed intact. It could have been done with a downloading system that had a time- or play-limited file that ate itself after a pre-set time, again, preserving DRM.

It’s like all the worst ideas in DRM in one easy-to-pocket package.

Now, it's clear from their site that the Play-Away realizes it could have some really clear market niches it could fill.

These units would be perfect for check-out at a library and could be more cost effective than the iPod shuffle solutions for book borrowing that I've read of. It's another method of delivering audio-rick content for museums, exhibits and walking tours. In any situation where there's a desire to delivery the same content to many people in an ordered way, the Play-Away is a welcome change from the clunky tape players I used to use when going through the Memphis Wonders series of exhibits.

But as a consumer-focused audiobook solution, it seems like a force-fit.

Though we may be geeks for anything new tech, I don't see the Play-Away having legs in the WebSlog household.