I signed up for an Audible account only to find that the books can't be played on my Mac. I contacted Audible customer service and they basically said it's a problem on Apple's end and I'd need to contact Apple. I haven't done that yet but maybe I will.
In the meantime, I'd like to listen to the book. I do see that there is software available that supposedly can remove the DRM, but all such software that I've found costs money.
Does anyone know if there's a way to do this free of cost? You'd think someone would have written a simple open source command line tool. But then again, I don't know the first thing about DRM.
So I completely forgot to contact Apple, though I doubt it would have done much good.
Anyway, I decided to just go with OpenAudible, which, stranegly enough, is shareware, not open source. (I think it started off as open source, and then they never changed the name.) It doesn't let you convert to mp3 without a license, but the license was only $12.00 so not too bad. Worked great at what I needed it for.
Great! Thanks for info.
Unfortunately, I just found out that we aren't allowed to purchase audiobooks through Audible unless we agree not to bypass the DRM (listed as number iv under "Content Restrictions" (https://www.audible.com/legal/conditions-of-use)) :(
Darn!
I'm tempted to just ignore the Conditions and do it anyway. But I think that might constitute lying. (Clicking "I agree" when I don't actually agree...) I don't know. Guess I'll hold off on it for now.
Audible supplies a pc-based app (probably a mac version too) called Audible Manager to convert the books to mp3 (I think). I haven't gotten the hang of it yet. I'll do more research today and post what I find here.
I don't believe they have a Mac app. Their website just says to use the Books app (Apple's built-in app for ebooks/audiobooks)
Anyway I contacted Audible and Apple a few more times, and somebody from Audible was able to get it working for me. Apparently the problem isn't very widespread, but I'm not the only one who was having it. It still hasn't been fixed for everybody, but Audible found some sort of workaround and was able to get it working for me.
Great!