The story
History
The company's first product was an eponymous portable media player known as the Audible MobilePlayer; released in 1997, the device contained around four megabytes of on-board flash memory storage, which could hold up to two hours of audio. To use the player, consumers would download an audiobook from the Audible website.
On March 11, 1999, Microsoft invested $11 million into the company. On October 24, 1999, Audible suffered a setback when its CEO, Andrew J. Huffman, died. Development proceeded, however, leading to Audible licensing the ACELP codec for its downloads in 2000, and Amazon bought a 5 percent stake in the then-publicly traded company the same year.
In 2003, Audible reached an agreement with Apple to be the exclusive provider of audiobooks for iTunes Music Store. This agreement ended in 2017 due to antitrust rulings in the European Union.
In 2005, the service released "Audible Air," which allowed users to download audiobooks directly to PDAs and smartphones. Its content would update automatically, downloading chapters as required that would then delete themselves after they had been listened to. In 2006, the company released its A-List collection, which had famous works read by Anne Hathaway and Annette Bening.
In 2007, CEO Donald Katz moved the company headquarters with 125 employees from suburban Wayne, New Jersey to Newark. The new headquarters was a high-rise building on One Washington Park.
On January 31, 2008, Amazon announced they would purchase Audible for about $300 million. In April of that year, Audible began producing exclusive science fiction and fantasy audiobooks under its "Audible Frontiers" imprint. At launch, 25 titles were released.
In May 2011, the service launched Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX), an online rights marketplace and production platform. The platform was so successful that in 2012, Audible reported it had received more titles from ACX than from its top three audio providers combined. In March 2012, Audible launched the A-List Collection, a series showcasing Hollywood stars including Claire Danes, Colin Firth, Anne Hathaway, Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L. Jackson, Diane Keaton, Nicole Kidman, and Kate Winslet performing great works of literature. Firth's performance of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair was named Audiobook of the Year at the Audie Awards in 2013.
The service began offering its narration workshops at acting schools, including Juilliard and Tisch School of the Arts; in 2013, Audible's CEO speculated that the company was the largest single employer of actors in the New York area.
Read the full text
In September 2012, Audible introduced a feature known as "Whispersync for Voice," which allows users to continue audiobooks from where they left off reading them on Amazon Kindle.
In 2016, the company announced that it would open a new facility in Newark, New Jersey, the "Innovation Cathedral," in a former Second Presbyterian Church, last used in 1995.
In July 2019, a new feature was announced called Audible Captions, in which machine-generated text would be displayed alongside the audio narration. The company was sued by the Association of American Publishers shortly thereafter for copyright violation. The lawsuit was settled in early 2020, with Audible agreeing not to implement the Captions feature without obtaining express permission.
In November 2020, Audible modified its return and exchange policy in response to concerns by authors, who felt that customers were abusing the policy to listen to audiobooks without paying.
Original content
In May 2015, Audible hired Eric Nuzum, formerly VP of programming at NPR, as its SVP of original content development. He resigned in 2018 after the original podcast staff at Audible were laid off.
In 2016, the service introduced an on-demand service known as "Audible Channels," which features short-form audio programming from various outlets, including news and other original productions. Access is included as part of Audible's subscription, and also became available to Amazon Prime subscribers. Nuzum compared this strategy to original content created by HBO or Netflix, and stated that the service deliberately avoided use of the word "podcast" as to not alienate listeners unfamiliar with the concept.
Among its original productions are Where Should We Begin?, a relationship podcast with Esther Perel; Sincerely, X, a podcast featuring anonymous TED Talks; Ponzi Supernova, a chronicle of the Madoff investment scandal; The Butterfly Effect, a podcast series by Jon Ronson chronicling the impact of PornHub on internet pornography; and West Cork, a true crime podcast investigating an unsolved 1996 murder in West Cork, Ireland.
In August 2018, it was reported that Nuzum was stepping down, and that Amazon had laid off most of the short-form content staff. This move came amid a shift in Audible's original content strategy, including a greater focus on "audiobook-first" deals with writers.
The service added a new tier for subscribers to access Audible Originals, announced in fall 2020, called Premium Plus, including over 11,000 titles (as of the launch). These titles included earlier original material, plus new audio productions featuring such creators as Common, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kate Mara, Harvey Fierstein, Michael Caine and Jesse Eisenberg. More recent releases include Newark Mayor Ras Baraka's memoir and two works by Brown Sugar screenwriter Michael Elliot.
In 2024, Audible announced new audio projects including an audio adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four titled "1984" starring Andrew Garfield, Cynthia Erivo, Andrew Scott and Tom Hardy. Kerry Washington and Daniel Dae Kim performed main roles in an adaptation of the Broadway play David Henry Hwang's "Yellow Face" exploring themes of cultural appropriation.
From Wikipedia’s article on Audible (service), shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4