Audible and audiobooks, the fastest growing part of publishing

It’s simplistic but not entirely inaccurate to say that Audible’s parent, Amazon, is to book publishing what Facebook and Google are to magazines: the troll under the bridge whose idea of a toll is to devour consumers and competitors whole. From the first, founder and CEO Donald Katz saw portability as his selling point; several years before the Apple iPod came on the market, Audible designed its own version of Bellamy’s indispensable, an audio player “roughly the size and shape of an electric razor.” A 2017 post on the Audible website takes the old Books On Tape ad to the next level, boasting, “there’s a world of movers and shakers getting through their books and podcasts in half the time.”

Source: thebaffler.com