Entries tagged with “audible” from Tools of Change for Publishing

Audible CEO: Publishing Has History of Tech Ambivalence

Peter Brantley
August 22, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

In an interview with Fast Company, Audible CEO Donald Katz discusses the publishing industry's history of slow technological acceptance:

Publishing is an industry pursuing a noble cultural calling. But publishing has always had an ambivalent relationship to technology-driven change. In fact, the music publishing business spent a whole lot of time trying to kill off the phonograph. The publishing industry fought off the paperback and was skeptical of the book club -- which was effectively a technology-driven invention that used the new science of direct marketing and the mail to change the business. Now there are innovations like Amazon and Audible [Note: Amazon acquired Audible in January '08]

Effectively, from my perspective, these disruptions -- along with Superstores -- changed a relatively aristocratic product into a mass market product. A lot of these disruptions have allowed increasingly middle class and lower middle class people to have access to books, which were traditionally for rich people.

(Via Reading 2.0 list)

Related Stories:

• Amazon Acquires Audible
• Last Days of the Audiobook Cassette
• Tag an Audio Clip, Buy it Later
• It's Time to Accept an Ambiguous Digital Fate