… and if want a CD, it’s a lot cheaper to burn it yourself from the downloaded file, we have videos online that explain the entire process and customers react really well. My guess is that downloadable audio books will be taking over the market just as downloadable flicks will be the future.

But look out because the audiobook industry is about to get yanked into the 21st century, whether it wants to or not.

Some sample changes include: Drag-and-Drop Audiobooks instead of all this file downloading and moving them around. The ability to jump from computer to computer, and have your audiobook experience follow you without moving media or files. A personal bookshelf with multiple open books and bookmarks for each that also follows you around. Each family member can have their own. Make it all globally available and WiFi ready so you can use it anywhere. Add in email support so you can drag-and-drop audiobooks to/from your mail client so you can share with friends and family without violating copyright. And there is just so much more. Virtual Audiobook Technology is here! Now!

The best part… It is so easy a 4 year old can use Illustrated Audiobooks (’Peter Rabbit’ and ‘Benjamin Bunny’) without assistance! Also without assistance, my blind 85 year old mother can use audiobooks that I have put on her ‘bookshelf’, and I can load them from anywhere in the world.

Library subscribers get access to everything with no fees for content. The revenue split with content providers is 50/50.

Audio Pod (www.audiopod.ca) is currently testing technology using a collection of public domain and copyright material, so quality varies for now. Come and have a look at the technology, install and use it for free during the test period. Our resources are limited, so help us work out the rest of the bugs.

You want change… here it comes…

On a side note, is it true Jobs has AIDs?

This is what Steve Jobs had to say about the music industry and it applies to other audio content.

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

Great Job.

Jason

Fair enough. But I still think the percentage of people who would download audiobook MP3’s if only it were easier/cheaper is a fairly small part of the potential market. I guess I just think that your other three points are far bigger problems.

Your solutions are definitely heading in the right direction. In a general sense beyond just electronic downloads, people need to see getting audiobooks as being little or no hassle and not being exorbitant. The library (and podcasts if you have Itunes) are the only place where both those things are true right now

Your disagreement on #2 comes in the form of a support for my argument. As mentioned in the article, you can point to thousands of happy listeners to audiobooks. However, there are hundreds of thousands of others who DON’T have an easy time with it. MP3s aren’t the answer for everyone, but in a digital world, it should be a lot easier to get many more people happier with the process.

Delivering HP via IP would be stupidly cheap on a per download basis because one could plan to deliver the ba-zillion copies using a cost-effective service.

Yes, the TOTAL cost of the server storage, the bandwidth, the processing and such does go up, but economies of scale mean that the costs go up VERY much slower than the revenue streams.

Um, that’s not entirely true. I’m not sure how much Podiobooks.com has to spend on serving podcasts each month, but “This American Life” spends over $150K each year for their weekly podcast bandwidth. That’s not approach zero.

Distribution over the Internet is inexpensive as long as you have a small listenership, but as more people start to consume bandwidth, it gets more expensive. Imagine the cost to Podiobooks if Harry Potter had been electronically distributed through your site :-).

Ben

I agree with three of your four points. And they are critical ones.

I don’t really agree with #2. I can name a dozen friends and relatives who listen to audiobooks regularly, don’t have MP3 players, and will only listen to my podcast if I give it to them on CD. In several cases, I have gotten them to use the feedburner email subscription feature, where they just get the email and click to listen. But it’s not as convenient for them as getting a CD.

The majority of people - and especially audiobooks listeners - still do not listen to a lot of things on their computers. They don’t consider CD’s somehow not conducive to being on-the-go. I’d bet that a huge percentage of Itunes users are under 45, while I suspect there are more audiobooks listeners older than that than younger than that. Most of them are not using audible.com at all. They get their books at the library (it’s amazing how many people do this, and I’ve actually looked into working with libraries on linking to my podcast) and the bookstore/Amazon. I think it’s easy to make the mistake of putting our frame of reference onto the population as a whole.

Now, I am not saying I think that this is either ideal, or that this is how it will be forever. And one could argue that the audience could be bigger if they made them more friendly for the MP3 generations. But I don’t consider this a really big part of how the audiobook industry currently is broken.

“To do something similar with an audio-book requires a director, sound editor (with equipment) and voice actor(s) - all of which are expensive, especially when the market for a audio-book is vanishingly small compared to the printed one.”

There’s a presumption that creating a quality narration in a novel length requires those things. I’m gonna take offense at that. I’ll stack my audio quality against pretty much anybody - including McGraw Hill and Audible. It DOES require a certain level of skill and expertise. It does NOT require a $500/hr studio. I could envision a very interesting cottage industry where podiobook authors might be subcontracting with the publishing houses to produce the audio for a flat rate. I’d do the narration for a L.E. Modesitt or Jim Butcher novel in a heartbeat for a $5000 flat rate.

There’s also a causal relationship that the publishing houses are ignoring regarding the “vanishingly small” market.

When you sell a $5 product for $50 — or even $15 — there aren’t gonna be a heck of a lot of people who buy it. The *reason* the market is so small is because they’ve completely lost sight of the price points. Audiobooks need a lower price point than massmarket so we’re looking at an under $10 price — 5.99 maybe — in order to ignite that market segment.

There are MILLIONS of mp3 players out there. A whole industry has grown up supporting them with things like car-adapters, speaker systems, cases, and the like. The ONE place in the market that has failed to keep up is the content — and largely for the reasons that Evo has pointed out above.

- they’re too hard to “consume”
- they’re too expensive to acquire

I think the lack of availability is related to the expense. The chicken-egg problem … they’re too expensive so nobody buys them and since nobody buys them, the publishers don’t produce them — which keeps the price up because it’s not a cost thats amortized across a lot of sales, so they’re too expensive and nobody buys them…

Just my opinion.

Mark? You’re right about the oversimplification — to a point. But your still talking about the same old methodologies as “required”. You know, more of what doesn’t work.

I think the article oversimplifies the situation though. A publisher strives for high quality, they reject poor and medium quality stories and run through a careful review/edit process to try and ensure the books that are released under their name are reasonably high. To do something similar with an audio-book requires a director, sound editor (with equipment) and voice actor(s) - all of which are expensive, especially when the market for a audio-book is vanishingly small compared to the printed one.

Once the cost to create is over, then the audio can be distributed cheaply forever, but publishers know that popularity of older titles tends to decline rapidly and so the chance to make up the creation-cost by reduced distribution costs may not be so easily done.