Amazon to buy Audible.com
In the light of the $45 billion proposed Microsoft-Yahoo deal, this tech deal is spenny-ante – but it is, nevertheless, quite interesting. Amazon announced it would buy digital audiobook retailer Audible.com for $300 million. Audible.com has a catalog of 80,000 titles, all spoken word books, magazines, and broadcast programs. All can be downloaded to PCs and, from there, to portable audio equipment like iPods.
Audible, which is by a long shot the world leader in its $930 million-a-year category, has divisions in the UK, in France, and Germany. It sells subscriptions as well as individual downloads, and claims to have around a half-million customers.
This is an extension for Amazon, which has mad strong efforts in recent years to develop download services, for ebooks, for films, and for digital music. But what it does, for the first time, is put Amazon n the subscription business, a far cry from selling one book or CD at a time.
Interestingly, Audible has an exclusive deal to supply Apple with audio content for iTunes. But Amazon is competing very directly with iTunes in terms of downloadable music. That puts both Amazon and Apple in an awkward position. It also might bring up antitrust issues, as the Audible deal gives Amazon a dominating role in the industry.
Some analysts see the move as an attempt to boost Kindle, Amazon’s proprietary e-book hardware. The idea would be presumably to have both the written and the spoken word in combination. A New York Times article ("Could Amazon and Audible Rewrite the Rules of Publishing?". 1/31/08) sees the possibilities; "How about a service that allows you to seamlessly switch from reading a book on your digital device to listening to the same book read aloud as you get in the car, or if your eyes are tired, or if you simply want to hear "
