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Digital Audiobooks Just Got Interesting
January 31, 2008

Sorry for the quiet, I have been sick. Rather interesting, though, to get back online today to learn about Amazon buying Audible. On the surface, this may not seem to be anything to get excited about, but on second glance this might start to seem like big news.

Audible is a digital audiobook provider. Okay, I can see why Amazon - which is still to some extent a book provider - might want to move into digital audiobooks. Surely it is a coincidence that Audible is the audiobook provider for Apple's iTunes store? This would only matter if Apple and Amazon competitors, though. How did a computer hardware maker and an online bookstore become competitors?

In short, they kind of met in the middle. Apple realized that providing content to fill their hardware was profitable, and Amazon realized that providing digital content to replace shipping physical content was profitable. Recently, Amazon has been pushing their MP3 single store, even going so far as to sign up for a huge free downloads promotion with Pepsi. iTunes tried a Pepsi giveaway back in 2003-2004, but it didn't go so well according to some. The Amazon-Pepsi partnership will provide up to 1 billion MP3s. So how did we get from music to audiobooks?

One word: Kindle. Amazon's e-book reader has some additional tricks hidden behind that e-ink display. For example, an SD expansion slot means you can drop in a really large storage card and have plenty of space to store MP3 files. Perhaps I should mention that the Kindle has a headphone port and plays MP3s. And what kind of MP3s might go well on an e-book reader? Perhaps....audiobooks?

So maybe it isn't pure coincidence that Amazon happened to buy the company that provides audiobooks to iTunes. Maybe things just got really interesting.

Posted by Chris Harris on January 31, 2008 | Comments (0)