Ben Buckman.net

Almost every radio station and podcast I've listened to lately has played ads for Audible.com. They appear to be a new Amazon affiliate selling audio books on an eMusic-style subscription model (and trying to quickly gain market share). The basic ("gold") plan is 1 "credit" (equals one book) per month for $14.95, then $22.95 for 2 books/month, $11.47 each.

My first impression was that $15 for an audio book is not much of a discount. Malcolm Gladwell's new book What The Dog Saw, for example, would be 1 credit ($15 or $23 rounded) with a subscription. Non-members pay $13.22. So it's cheaper to buy the book than to get a gold account. Amazon (the parent company) has the book for "$14.17 or less with new Audible membership." Regular price for the audiobook on Amazon is $26.39, which seems very high, as a way to push customers to Audible. The Kindle version is $9.00.

Maybe I'm being unreasonable, but $15 seems reasonable to me for a hardcover book because of their heavier/fancier binding. Softcovers should be $10 or less. Audiobooks feel more like softcovers, or eBooks, or an album of music; $15 each is too expensive.

I signed up for the 14-day free trial, so I'll redeem my one free book and cancel immediately. I'll read Gladwell on my Kindle, and stick to podcasts, library audiobooks, and free digital audiobooks for the time being.

Update: The software is also really bad. It's puke-green colored, the font looks like Windows 3.1, buttons are half-hidden on prompts. The format appears to be something proprietary; you have to download ".adh" files which are used by the Audible Manager to download ".aa" files. (Specifically, they're all called aw_dhelper.pl.adh, so I thought the two parts of the book I got were the same file and almost missed half the book.) To play the files on other programs or devices, the software downloads plugins for each device, which seems unnecessary. I used my free credit on Jeff Jarvis' What Would Google Do, and I'm canceling the trial now.