About Audible

Online Seller of Children’s Books Offers Reviews and Ratings

Now that the notion of paying for music online is no longer on par with changing your own oil, it makes sense that there are more specialized online collections of listening material to buy. Last week, Audible.com introduced AudibleKids, a collection of 4,000 audio books like “Caps for Sale,” “Charlotte’s Web” and such classics of American literature as the SpongeBob SquarePants chapter books.

The site is trying to be more than an online bookstore. There is a parents-help-parents element to it, with star ratings and reviews like “Listening to ‘Caps for Sale’ reminded me of books I read as a kid,” or “If you want to go to sleep, get this one.”

You can click any book cover to get sample clips or, in some cases, the entire book. You can search by keyword or use age or subject headings to find a book, for example, on animals for your 13-year-old daughter’s iPod. Now that the children have the hardware, services like this make it easier to mix some tracks of classic literature in between the tunes.

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Audible Inc. launches an audio book site for iPod-savvy kids April 15, 2008

Building on the popularity of iPods and MP3 players among kids and teens, Audible Inc., recently acquired by Amazon.com Inc., has launched AudibleKids.com as a site offering nearly 4,000 audio book titles from more than 75 publishers.

“We see a real business opportunity in the amount of children’s books in print but never produced before now in audio form, while iPods and MP3 players have become so prevalent among young people,” says Brian Fitzgerald, vice president of education at Audible and general manager of AudibleKids.com.

Audible cites figures from C&R Research Inc. showing that more than 50% of children in the third grade have either iPods or MP3 digital content players. “We also see a high demand among parents to take part in their kids’ education and get them excited about books,” Fitzgerald says.

Audible, which became a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com last month, developed AudibleKids.com independent of its new parent over the last 18 months, Fitzgerald says. The new site, like its sister site Audible.com, was developed in-house on Audible’s own technology, he adds.

AudibleKids offers shopping features not found on Audible.com, including the ability to search for audio book titles by appropriate age group or school grade and to share recommendations with other shoppers, educators, librarians and other experts based on the age or gender of audio book recipients. “We fully expect AudibleKids to reposition digital music players as story-tellers and learning machines, and thus build a new generation of enthusiastic readers,” says Audible founder and CEO Donald Katz.

AudioKids sells audio books at prices ranging from 99 cents for a seven-minute version of “The Little Engine that Could” to more than $80 for “War and Peace,” which runs more than 62 hours in audio form.

Audible is No. 125 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide; Amazon is No. 1.

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“Audible is also bringing content directly to consumers. Audible makes 140,000 hours of spoken programming from over 500 content partners available on its web site. Users can download individual books or subscribe for a book or two a month. But now the company is picking books to skip the print process, and bring them directly–audibly–to customers.

Audible produced a new book called “The Chopin Manuscript,” written by seven different thriller writers, and available only on Audible. This is a win-win: Audible gets original content to attract listeners”

Cyberfamilias
Living Comfortably Behind a Wall of Sound

“Of course, this was not the outcome I had envisioned three days earlier, when I began an experiment on whether I could finally read without reading.

Don’t laugh. Not reading is something we may have to get used to sooner than you think. Consider, for instance, that two days ago Audible.com, the company that already sells digitized versions of more than 40,000 different book, magazine and newspaper titles, started selling (for $19.95) an audio version of the first serial thriller novel by best-selling writers to originate as an audio download instead as a paper book.

In other words, you can only listen to “The Chopin Manuscript.” More hear-only books like this one — which was written by 15 authors, and narrated by the actor Alfred Molina — are in the pipeline; Audible.com has moved into a new facility with recording studios and plans to create more original content. “This is part of an evolution….

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For hot author’s latest, get out your headphones

It’s hard to beat thriller writer Jeffrey Deaver (The Bone Collector) in creating surprising plot twists. But audio-download company Audible may have done that for his latest work, The Chopin Manuscript.

Audible says the novel— which Deaver describes as “The Day of the Jackal meets The Da Vinci Code” — will be the first major work of fiction created to be introduced only as an audio download.

In addition, it’s the first project in which Audible also owns a piece of the ancillary rights, which could pay off if it becomes a printed book or film.

“This was a case where it didn’t exist, and we felt it ought to exist,” says Audible CEO Donald Katz, 55.

His company is the leading spoken-word audio-download service, with more than 40,000 narrated books, newspapers and magazines — many of which it records — as well as paid podcasts, lectures and performances.

Narrated by actor Alfred Molina, Chopin’s first three chapters will be available on Audible.com on Sept. 25. It will add two chapters a week over the subsequent seven weeks.

The price: $19.95, with 20% off for pre-orders.

Katz, a former business journalist, hopes that the splashy release will reinforce an image for Audible as “the HBO of audio.” The company he co-founded now is finding its footing following several unexpected turns in its 15-year history.

Chopin began as a fundraising project for a group called the International Thriller Writers (ITW).

Deaver agreed to write an opening chapter establishing the characters and the premise of the story. He passed it along to a “Murderers’ Row” of 15 colleagues, including Lee Child (Bad Luck and Trouble), Joseph Finder (Power Play), Lisa Scottoline (Daddy’s Girl) and Jim Fusilli (Hard Hard City).

Each wrote a successive chapter before sending it back to Deaver, who tied things up in the last two chapters.

Knowing this work would begin life as an audiobook affected the writing, Deaver says. Best for listeners, he says, “is pithy dialogue and descriptive passages, so when they’re driving down I-95, they’ll be able to picture this and it will stay with them. I found it a lot easier than writing a traditional, written novel. I’d definitely like to do a project again.”