When I first started,” says Don Katz of his founding Audible in 1995, “I was attacked by people I did and didn’t know for abandoning the writing life”—he had worked as a staff writer for Rolling Stone, among other publications—“but more profoundly for abandoning text and going over to this realm that was considered suspect and not really core to the literary experience.” That realm—audiobooks, especially the kind you can download as MP3 files over the Internet—has become a huge market and one of publishing’s growth areas, as more people discover both the pleasures of listening to recorded books and the convenience of getting media from the Web. Katz was there before audiobooks were something people downloaded, and since Amazon acquired Audible in early 2008, he continues to innovate and to push audiobooks toward new audiences.
When Katz started, he knew he was facing a challenge—people thought audiobooks were weird, if not sacrilegious, and they didn’t trust e-commerce. But he looked back at big media shifts from earlier in his career for help. Katz tells PW, “I was at Rolling Stone when MTV was formed around us, and I was on the masthead at Sports Illustrated when ESPN was formed, and in both cases you stand there and think, How could that happen that you have these franchised players who didn’t respond to a media-type change?” He didn’t want to make the same mistake with Audible. “You have to build a company up from the customer,” Katz continues, “and the reality is that in our world it’s still not easy to create new customers because it’s a classic behavioral change—you have to do a couple things and own a device. We focused on the customer enough and realized that this could be part of a habit, and completely changed the consumer perception of what an audiobook is.”
Katz had to get used to the idea of audiobooks himself, but he had a predisposition to hearing literature read aloud that perhaps made him a more-likely-than-usual downloadable audiobook visionary. “I always loved prose, and I always heard literature, partly because I had the luck of studying with Ralph Ellison. With his help, I came to believe that American literature was the product of vernacular. I always accepted that listening to literature was a discrete and really powerful experience,” Katz says. He was, however, surprised by how many others felt the same way about listening to books: “What I didn’t know and I now know, just from what’s happened to Audible, is how addictive listening to audiobooks is. Our average member is on track to listen to 17 books per year, compared to a tiny number for the average casual listener of physical audiobooks.”
“It’s completely changed,” says Katz about the perception of audiobooks today. “Listening to audiobooks has really been embraced not only as an acceptable literary and intellectual experience but as something that’s become a legitimate performance art.” Katz is obsessed with quality as well as with his users’ experience, which, he said, is a secret to his success and a reason why Audible and Amazon are a good fit. “Amazon and Audible share the fact that both companies are absolutely focused on the customer experience,” he says. Beyond that, Katz believes that being part of Amazon gives him a lot without taking anything away: “ We have almost complete independence in the most important ways, but [we also have] access to their unbelievably deep tech infrastructure and their customer base.”
Katz says he’s very happy with Audible’s recent growth. To keep that growth going, Katz needs more content; he says more audiobooks promises growth not only for Audible but for publishers. “What’s happened is that our members are so voracious,” Katz says, “that in various categories, they run out of audiobooks. So we go to the publishing community to say, up your supply, and those that do almost always grow faster. But if they don’t, we have to serve the customer, so we make them ourselves,” which leads to new products like the Audible Modern Vanguard line, a series of classic books—including titles by Saul Bellow, Donald Barthelme and Paul Auster—that Audible has commissioned to fill a gap in its catalogue. But, publishers, if you want a piece of Audible’s growing success, you better get cracking on these audiobooks.
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