The Audible is factually a chokepoint. Unlike other chokepoints. Amazon and Kindle do not disallow other publishing outlets.
Doctorow is quite intelligent and can explain things well when he wants to. I think this was an intentional but not a malicious lie.
Misleading: Audible does not have a monopoly on distributing the author's work if only because the Author can distribute it many other ways without a legal problem with Audible.
The motivation was grevance about DRM and a DRM publisher.
Audible places no restriction on the copyright owners to distribute any other way they want.
People will think that Amazon and Audible have somehow claimed copyright. which they have not. And it is not at all true. Audible players are FREE. If you decide never to use Audible for some grevance. you can always record the book off Audible once and keep that recording. You can even easily script this.
if you narrate a book yourself or hire a narrator and get the raw audio files, you can put the book on audible (DRMed) and ALSO distribute DRM free, or use another DRM distributor/seller. I don't recall an exclusive distribution provision by Audible of the performance content or a grant of copyright to them. Similarly for kindle.
No. Google says: "The titles that you purchase from Audible with a credit or credit card are yours to keep forever and are available to be downloaded across multiple devices. Although you can remove your audiobook(s) from a specific device. they remain in your Library."