Reading with your ears
Published: 23 Aug 2004 10:40 BST
For years, the best-seller list on Audible.com, a Web merchant that sells downloadable audio books and periodicals, was a predictable affair. You had your high-end thrillers such as The Da Vinci Code, the hot self-help and business how-to tomes of the moment, and the odd chunk of Tom Clancy and Stephen King.
Those authors have had some curious bedmates lately, however, sharing the list with names such as Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld.
Audible began a curious experiment in public service and alternative business promotion early this year by offering free recordings of major testimony from the 9/11 Commission hearings. The downloads were a hit and have prompted further free pieces of history-in-the-making, including top speeches from the Democratic National Convention. Or you can spend $5 (£2.75) and get an unabridged audio version of the 9/11 Commission Report, knocked out by Audible's crew of professional readers in one weekend.
The public service phase has marked an encouraging new chapter for the Web merchant, which launched in 1997 and went through several years of financial hardship before cashing in on the boom in portable digital audio players.
With a rapidly growing customer base, major partners such as Apple Computer, and a continuing decrease in the amount of time the average person has for reading, chief executive Donald Katz is feeling pretty good now that he had the right idea all along.
"I was an author for 20 years, and just for the books my friends were writing, I couldn't get to everything," he said. "I realised I could boost my consumption heavily if I took advantage of some of my idle time, and that's how Audible came about."
Katz recently spoke with ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com about public service, the iPod and other matters.
Q: You've expanded the range of what Audible does this year with the free downloads, starting with the 9/11 testimony. What was your thinking behind offering those?
A: What we basically realised when Richard Clarke did his 9/11 testimony was that if our mission is in fact to provide consumers with the most compelling, the most informative audio... then this was something that was particularly dramatic and historically important, to say nothing of creatively evocative. It was the kind of thing that was clearly much too long for a radio station to play. And it seemed like this was the kind of audio Americans should be going home from work listening to on their iPods. We decided to put it up simply as part of our service to the community and our mission.
At the time, The New York Times ran a little story saying basically that Audible was offering history in the making... and suddenly we got 100,000 downloads, including a lot of people who didn't know about Audible going in.
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