Amazon to Buy Audible for $300 Million
Submitted by mwilliams on Fri, 2008-02-01 02:51.Amazon announced today that it will be acquiring Audible, Inc. the country’s largest provider of digital downloads of spokenword audio to expand its reach in digital audio content. Audible, Inc. has over 80,000 programs, which include digital audio editions of books, newspapers and magazines, original programming, and TV and radio subscriptions. Very interesting.
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For more on the potential outcome of this union see:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/could-amazon-and-audible-rewrite-the-rules-of-publishing/?hp
There is no thief like a bad book
--Italian Proverb
This could be awesome. Search for a book and be able to download the audiobook version without having to wait for the CD to arrive.
Rat's Reading - http://reading.kingrat.biz/
Rat, you could already do that at Audible. It's a great company I'm not convinced them being bought will make them a better service. Amazon really just wants the customer database filled with people used to paying for audio for marketing their new mp3 store. It'd be sad if the service suffers because of it.
Oh, I know it can already be done at Audible. But now it will come up in Amazon search results, alongside the book you are looking for in the first place. That's huge. Audible never came up in Google results for any of the books I've searched for over the last couple of years. Amazon does. And I use Amazon's standalone search as well quite a bit.
Rat's Reading - http://reading.kingrat.biz/
Consolidation doesn't serve the interests of the consumer... just look at the Adobe + Macromedia merger.