Reading with your ears
Published: 23 Aug 2004 10:40 BST
And did those people stick around and buy paid Audible content?
It was business-efficient in the sense that people were learning about Audible and grateful for us culling this material. We went on to offer the Reagan funeral orations, the Democratic convention speeches, and people really appreciated all of it and stuck with us.
To me, it's an inflection point for the Internet and Audible. Two years ago, we could not give away anything for free. The whole ethic of the Web was that everything should be free, and Audible was always dedicated to the kind of content that people habitually pay for -- books, magazines, business information. We always worried that once we gave away audio for free, it was much harder to ever convince someone the other stuff was worth paying for. That's no longer the case now that the Web has matured and there's a pretty clear separation of premium content.
Does this change what Audible is? You're becoming something of an outlet for unfiltered news.
I don't know if I'd call us a news service. Having come out of a journalistic background, I don't see us doing that mission of capturing all things and culling what's real news. I think our mission is a little bit different.
But it's true that there's more to Audible than downloading "The Da Vinci Code." We have 37 different recurrent products that are published by us -- print publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American -- that you can get periodic audio digests we create. And you can get the major NPR (National Public Radio) programmes time-shifted to your listening schedule. That treasure trove of shorter content is probably the underappreciated part of what we do. We're offering people a way to stay profoundly informed on aspects of culture, politics and business.
You've survived at this longer than 99 percent of the Web content pure plays I can think of. What's your secret?
Our secret has been to have a good product and try to make it better every month. So we were able to sustain ourselves as digital audio players have actually become as ubiquitous as we expected they'd be all along. We just never stopped making our service better, as we've reached this inflection point now where iPods, PDAs, smart phones and other audio-capable devices are really reaching a level of ubiquity.
Speaking of iPod, you managed a feat that's escaped a lot of other companies -- by getting access to the players and iTunes. How'd you do it, and how important has it been for Audible?
I think it's had a tremendous effect. The iPod is kind of emblematic of the birth of the mobile digital media era. We invented the first digital audio device and brought it to market in 1997. You would have thought that in a year or two, the digital Walkman would have been everywhere because of Moore's Law. That didn't happen, and the iPod became this magical brand opening up people's eyes.
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