Lightning Source in LaVergne, Tenn., the Ingram division that provides print-on-demand and e-book fulfillment services, has formed an alliance with Didio Communications, a Leeds, U.K., company owned by the unabridged publisher Chivers. Didio helps audiobook publishers and retailers develop and implement digital audiobook download strategies and transfer encrypted digital audiobooks to their customers.
With this alliance, Lightning Source gains the ability to offer audio download services to its publisher clients by steering them to Didio; Didio gets access to Lightning Source's client base; and both companies get the opportunity to expand the possibilities for audio print-on-demand.
"The deal came about because, frankly, we were getting requests from both our publishing and retail communities for downloadable digital audiobooks—"e-audiobooks," so to speak," said Ed Marino, Lightning Source president and CEO. "We are large in the on-demand print business. We start with digital content. If our retailers have requests from their consumers for the physical book, we can put the digital content into print and provide that. If they want digital content transmitted electronically, we can do that. The missing piece was audio." With this alliance, "a retailer can put an e-audiobook edition of a title on its Web site, and when the consumer purchases it, that audiobook will be downloaded to the computer of the consumer."
Unlike Audible, which sells audio downloads directly to consumers, Lightning Source and Didio both work only with publishers and retailers, facilitating their clients' e-book and audio download businesses.
Combining Lightning Source's print-on-demand capabilities with Didio's digital audio services paves the way for audio print-on-demand, said consultant Seth Gershel (former senior v-p of Simon & Schuster Audio), who brokered the deal on behalf of his client Didio (and, incidentally, coined the terms "e-audiobook" and "audio print-on-demand"). "Publishers are used to dealing with Lightning Source for print-on-demand to create their physical inventory as needed," Gershel said. "We can now look forward to the day that an audiobook publisher could do the same thing with Didio, which could digitally produce one or more copies of an audiobook and send it to the publisher's customers."
Audio print-on-demand (or APOD, as Gershel likes to call it) could also broaden consumer acceptance of downloading audiobooks, Gershel said. "What's holding up the spread of consumer downloading of audiobooks, according to industry experts, is the time and complication required by the process," said Gershel. "This will improve over time as the bandwidth expands and the speed of downloading gets faster. But in the meantime, if you could temporarily eliminate the need for downloading with digital audio print-on-demand, it's a good interim step."
Audio print-on-demand could also use business models other than downloads to consumers. "Since you're digitizing files anyway, you could just run a CD off of the file," he said. "It could be encrypted or unencrypted. You could, for example, send the customer a free CD with the first 15 minutes of the audio unencrypted but the rest encrypted, so they could sample the beginning for free and would then have the opportunity to pay to unlock the rest of the program. In the unencrypted state, and as Lightning Source does for books, "APOD from Didio would also allow audiobook publishers to have the opportunity to keep their slower-moving backlist titles available for sale on CD, without forcing them keep on-hand inventory of these slower-moving titles," added Gershel.
