Simply Audiobooks Inc.

You know how some people review movies by saying, “Enh, rent it on video, not worth going to the theater.” I just discovered the inverse.

Because of the way movies are released, first to theaters, then to DVD, you’d almost never hear someone review a DVD and say, “Wow, it’s great, you should watch it at the theater” because it’s not at the theater any more. Doh. You just missed the boat.

I recently finished reading (not listening to) “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson. The book is getting a lot of press (good and bad).  I was quite excited to get a pre-release version of the print book at the recent book expo in Washington DC, and at the time, there was no audiobook available (or imminent I thought). Now as I’m in the final throes of enjoying the print version immensely, our CEO sticks his head in my office and says, “Hey, this Long Tail audiobook is great, you should listen to it!”

Much like Ted Danson’s character says in “Cheers” when he realizes there was a War and Peace movie, so his reading of the book was unecessary, my reaction was “THERE’S AN AUDIOBOOK?”  Aagh. I can listen to an audiobook in 1/3rd the time it takes me to read the paper version. And I enjoy it more. I can’t believe I was so impatient to read the darn thing that I didn’t wait for the (superior) version on audiobook.

So if you’re thinking about reading the Long Tail, take my advice. Wait for the audiobook.

I loved James Patterson’s first Angel Experiment book, “When the Wind Blows”. And although the sequels deteriorated a bit in quality, there were all enjoyable books.

So seeing a new book by Patterson based on the lead character from When the Wind Blows, I rented the first of the “Maximum Ride” books, which I discovered is only loosely based on the same characteres in the original series.

Here’s the interesting part (to me at least). I was captivated, absolutely captivated by the narrator and recording technique used in the first 5 minutes of the audiobook. Then in the sixth minute, doubt began to set in as something stupid happened. Over the next 30 minutes, about 5 more stupid things happened, as in implausible. Now, here I am listening to a book about humans with wings and I’m calling other plot elements implausible. Ironic.

Anyway, the plot was sill enough, especially with Max’s constant unwarrented lamentations about her situation, that I pulled out my return box to eject all the CDs and return it 1 disc in. Then I reconsidered, since I didn’t have another audiobook in the car. And lo, my brain went into a kind of post-traumatic stress mode where I just stopped taking the book seriously. And I’m kind of enjoying it now. I must say, the narration helps a LOT. I’ll probably give it a 3 of 5 when I’m done.

We just did a mini-survey of our customers (meaning we didn’t send the email to everyone), and discovered that 90% of our own members are aware of Netflix, and 35% or so are currently Netflix members. Now, nationwide, Netflix brand awareness is something like 20%, and about 7% of video renters are Netflix members, so there’s something funny going on here.

Yes, there is some skew because we only surveyed people who are internet-aware, but surely not skewed that much. What this means is that people who sign up for our service are already aware of the unlimited rental model. More significantly, only 10% of our customers were first made aware of the unlimited rental model by us. That must mean we’re doing a bad job of explaining it, at least on our website. I’m off to ponder.

I just discovered that over on our audiobook discussion forum, they’re running a contest for the best one-paragraph love story. I’m more the epic romance kind of guy, especially if it involves galaxy-spanning civilizations and/or time travel. But I was also a HUGE fan of a couple of book anthologies by Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg, the first of which was called “100 Short Short Stories.” (No audiobook version). It was a collection of sci-fi short stories under 3 pages each. Great fun. The requirement to develop a plot, characters, atmosphere… all in 3 pages, resulted in some great stories.

I don’t know what kind of stuff our customers and staff are going to come up with. But I’m sure there will be some gems. By the way, there’s a gift certificate for free service/books at stake, in case an incentive is needed. Here’s my entry:

Anamemdron gripped his portal gun tightly, only a slight trembling revealing his inexperience. His mission to steal in and out of the capital exposed, he clung to hope of escape as tightly as his young charge clung to his tunic. Barely 16, the princess understood all too well the fate that awaited her should the daring rescue fail. His focus went from the Count to the portal site and back to the Count. With a fully deployed temporal shield, the Count was immune to the one weapon at Anamemdron’s disposal, and he was advancing steadily. The princess began to cry softly, murmuring “I’d rather die than go back…”  With a flash of insight, Anamemdron turned his gun on himself, pulling the trigger before the Count’s leap of sudden desperation. And just like that, or rather, five years later, he found himself again with the princess clinging to him. But now very much of age, and VERY grateful for her rescue.

A funny thing happened to me a couple of weeks ago. An old song went running through my head, and I remembered having the cassette for it, so I went to find it. Managed to locate the tape without any difficulty, so then I went to find my…. uh oh. I don’t have a cassette player. What’d I do with that thing anyway? Ditto the deck in my car, since I bought my newest vehicle only a year ago. I found myself staring at the cassette, wondering why I even bothered keeping it.

So on the off chance that someday I might be able to sell it as an antique, I put away the tape. Went to my PC and purchased the song from yahoo. No need to feel sorry for me.

I bring it up because of a recent thread on an audiobook discussion group from a husband who wanted to buy his wife a replacement for her cassette player, but lamented the likely loss of bookmarking capability; and an iPod would be overkill. One reader commented, “what problem are you trying to solve? if she likes the cassette player, why replace it at all?”

Except  cassettes are indeed going the way of the wooly mammoth. Hunted to extinction by an army of bits on CDs and MP3 files. No matter how much you like your tape deck, you’ll have to replace it soon – mainly because the content isn’t being produced any more. How long before the same thing happens to CDs? My prediction is 20 years. Maybe by then I’ll have figured out what to do with my cassette collection.

A writer for a major national newspaper called me today; he’s working on a story about how couples now negotiate which audiobooks to listen to in the car the same way they negotiate (argue?) which movies to rent from the local video store.

It’s an interesting concept, and I’ve had my own experiences with my wife when we go on roadtrips. We usually agree on taking one book each that is “ours” and a few that we can listen to together when we’re both awake. What I remember is that we could only listen for 20 minutes or so before we’d get into an argument about what we were hearing (mostly self-help type books).

If you have stories on how you select books in the face of competition from another listener, I’d love to hear them. And I’ll put you in touch with the writer so you can get quoted in the paper.

Well well, we’ve finally received initial data from a large-scale audiobook consumption survey we commissioned several months ago in conjunction with the Audio Publishers Association and several other industry players. Not surprisingly, audiobook listeners have higher than average income, education level, and propensity to consume paper books.

There are other elements of the study that are more illuminating (we already knew you were smart). For example, 7% of audiobook consumption is digital download. The number one (by far) reason people get their first audiobook is for a long road trip (we thought it would be a friend giving it to them). The skew on age for audiobook listeners is younger than we’d expected (significant uptake at 18-24). And 68% of listeners get their audiobooks from the library.

There’s a lot more (95 pages worth) and I’ll be excerpting more for this blog, as well as including some of the data in future newsletters. I’m off to read more.

When I was young, my dad used to read me bedtime stories every night. I used to love being read to…until he learned a comedy technique from the late comic/pianist Victor Borge. Every time there was a word that sounded the same as a number, he’d ‘add 1′ to it. So the phrase, “The girl went to the store” would be read as “The girl went three the store”. I used to get so frustrated with him and he’d just chuckle and keep going.

I look back with such fond memories on those times, and in fact, my dad and I still laugh about it! My point? I think they should make audio books that do this! Wouldn’t it be great to be listening to a romance novel and hear the narrator say, “It was a twoderful evening and he had the perfect gift five her. It would never be fivegoteleven”.

No? Well, maybe it’s just me then.

I just realized I hadn’t done any reviews on the Audiobook site in months, and feeling guilty, I went through the process of finding my rental history and looking aghast at the 50 or so titles that were unrated. I quickly went through and put in star ratings for all of them, then felt guilty about taking the easy path – so I went back in and picked some of my favourite titles to write real reviews for.
Then after writing some glowing reviews, I felt guilty again. I feel like I’m leaving the potential for bad books to be listened to because I was too lazy to go downgrade them. So I went back in again and wrote some scathing reviews. Used adjectives like “bad”, and “very”, and “really”. I let ‘em have it.

Then I felt that if I’m going to do a good job, I really should take my ratings more seriously, so I felt I had to go back and review all of my numerical ratings for accuracy. Halfway through this process I thought, “Am I taking myself too seriously here?” After all, what do people care what I think anyway?

After doing some stats checking, it seems that our reviews are one of the most viewed sections of the site, and some random sample surveying has revealed that many of our subscribers depend on reviews to select the books they listen to. So I’m going to be diligent from now on. And if you don’t mind, I’d love to read your reviews too.

I ran across a great blog entry and variously misguided, insightful, and silly comments on why audiobooks are good/bad. Apparently there is much angst among the book community on the subject of audiobooks – almost a silent (except for the listening part) war. Listen up! It’s not about reading vs listening. It’s about whether you access the book at all. I’m a voracious reader for someone with only an hour a day to read. Listening to books triples my book ingesting time.

I find particularly silly the comment pairing about how being able to read at your own pace makes books better, and then that you don’t get the full experience while listening (because your attention is divided). Well, most people I know skim parts of books and that’s what they call “their own pace”. At least with a book on tape, you don’t have to lick your fingers to skip ahead.