Simply Audiobooks Inc.

I just finished “Memoirs of a Geisha“, and enjoyed it immensely. When the movie came out, I heard from many people that it wasn’t very good, so I didn’t bother seeing it, even though I’m a huge fan of movies in general, and Ziyi Zhang in particular (she plays Chiyo/Sayudi).

Now that I’ve read the book, I realize I made a mistake in not seeing the movie. I used to use critic/user reviews to determine which books and movies to read/see and I’ve realized that my own particular tastes are far more important than what people in general think of a particular production. If I like the cast, or I like the general concept, I’ll generally like the movie.

Does the same apply to books? There is no ‘cast’ per se, but the general concept filter still applies. And of course there’s the author. If you like Clancy, you’ll probably like all of his earlier books. Except the later ones seem a blatant attempt to cash in on the earlier work. I’m convinced Clancy, Grisham, Ludlum, Patterson, Steel, … all have summer interns writing their newer material.

Two interesting notes I got from a friend about “Memoirs of a Geisha” – most people think the book is non-fiction. It’s not. Complete fiction. And it wasn’t written by a female, let alone a Geisha.

I had a discussion with a co-worker yesterday about where people listen to audiobooks. We’re constantly developing promotional campaigns, the latest being a video ad promoting the benefits of audiobooks. After going through many iterations of creative (?) ideas, we settled on an in-car scenario. I wonder if that is the right thing to do – because every piece of survey data we have says only about 50% of audiobooks fans listen in the car.

The problem here is that I and pretty much everyone else within shouting distance listen to our audiobooks on the way to work. But based on the popularity of downloadable audiobooks, and watching people on transit buses, it would appear that the in-car appeal isn’t universal.

So the question is, do we focus on promoting in-car or some generic advantage? (there are lots). It brings to mind that the two main advantages of audiobooks are 1) reading more, and 2) making better use of your time. Our own data shows that #2 is the driver for people who are new to audiobooks, and #1 is the reason people SAY they like audiobooks. Perhaps efficiency isn’t seen as a noble trait?

We launched our UK site, www.simplyaudiobooks.co.uk one week ago, and much to our gratification, it would appear that the originators of the audiobook concept still retain their enthusiasm for the product. In fact, early results have surprised me, and I’m usually over-optimistic.

Despite being the birthplace for audiobooks, the UK doesn’t have nearly as many options for getting them as in the US, or even Canada. Part of the reason is that licensing contracts between publishers and retailers in the UK are more complicated, and part of the reason is a generally less commercial environment.

One great piece of news I got across my desk yesterday is that iPod penetration in the UK is only 50% (vs 78% in the US). Our download product is not directly compatible with iPod, and as a result, our download product is even more popular than we expected in the UK.

Jolly good.

I started listening to Memoirs of a Geisha today, and I must say that my first few minutes were rocky. As soon as I heard the voice of the narrator, with the Japanese (I presume) accent, I was annoyed. Why can’t she talk with proper unaccented english so I don’t have to strain to understand what she’s saying?

Of course, within one track I was immersed in the story and the accent had become part of what drew me into the atmosphere of the book. It reminded me that a few weeks ago, “Secret Life of Bees” had started out with a strong southern accent and that annoyed me too. But again, it became crucial to creating a more vivid image in my mind of what was happening in the novel.

I guess I’ll tolerate the accents until one comes up that I actually have trouble deciphering. It’ll be fun to go find one of the sci-fi books I read when I was younger where the author used some weird language constructs to create an ‘alien’ environment. All it did was make me take another book out of the library.

When Simply Audiobooks first got going, I expected that most of our customers would listen to business books, educating themselves in the car as they sped (or crawled) to work. I was quite surprised then that most of our customers (>70%) listen to fiction, completely independent of whether they are car commuters, business people, men, women, younger, older, ….

Up til then, I’d spent most of my own time in the car listening to business books and biographies. So I started to wonder why everyone preferred fiction. Perhaps they knew something I didn’t? Over the past year or so, I’ve listened primarily to fiction in the car and much to my surprise, I like it better than non-fiction. What I want to do in my car is forget about traffic, not give myself an early start to the business day.

As always, there are exceptions to the fiction preference, but I’m surprised by how few. And here’s another tidbit – the #1 fiction category is Science Fiction. As a lifelong science fiction fan, I find this somewhat gratifying, but also a bit worrisome. I don’t want everyone else knowing what the aliens are thinking.

As of 10:56 this morning, we activated our UK operations – sale and download club for now, rentals to follow. England is the birthplace of audiobooks, and we’re excited to see the reaction of people to the new entrant to the UK market.

It’s been fun trying to figure out how to modify our site to account for the different vocabulary and spelling used by Brits. Renting becomes Hiring. Mail becomes Post. Delivering by truck becomes delivering by lorry. How the heck did American english become so different? I can’t believe driving on the other side of the road gives people such a different perspective on life. Maybe it’s the tea.

In this blog, in our discussion forums, and in surveys of our customers, people always overwhelmingly support unabridged audiobooks. Even me.Of course this raises the question of why do the publishers insist on publishing the abridged dreck claiming to be worth reading. If someone can tell me why this is, I’d appreciate it.

But whoa, I’m listening to “Lifeguard” by James Patterson (unabridged), and although it’s ok, it’s not GREAT. And I just finished “Everyone Worth Knowing” by Lauren Weisberger (abridged) and it was GREAT. So I thought back, and surprisingly, the novels I’ve listened to lately that I’ve really enjoyed, were all abridged. The so-so ones were all unabridged (exception: Time Traveler’s Wife – amazing).

Maybe without even realizing it, I prefer abridged books. The reason I SAY I prefer unabridged is just that when I finish an abridged book I loved, I wish I’d had the unabridged instead, so the pleasure could have been extended. That’s hardly proof that the unabridged would’ve been better.

About 15 years ago when I first started listening to audiobooks, I quickly went through my local library’s selection, and found myself forced to listen to all sorts of dreck. This was of course before the advent of Simply Audiobooks, and the area I lived in (Ithaca, NY) didn’t have a local audiobook store. Listening to one particularly horrid collection of short stories, I found myself thinking about TV shows in audiobook format.

At the time, Cheers was a hit show on TV, and was heavily dialogue based. I imagined that a pure audio track from that show would still be fun to listen to. If I had already seen the show, so much the better. With well-known characters, it would be easy to visualize the scenes regardless. Recently I tested the approach, and taped the audio for an episode of Seinfeld. Listening to it later in my car, sure enough, I enjoyed it immensely.

It seems like this would be a good area for audiobook publishers to get into. I suppose someone here should look into it as well. I’m not sure how many shows this would work for. Certainly I think I’d enjoy “Everybody Loves Raymond”. It would be too complicated trying to listen to “West Wing” or “CSI”.

I’m just writing about this here on the off chance that some day this sort of audiobook becomes a popular phenomenon. So in case you, dear reader, are reading this ten years or so from now and TV track audiobooks are a big thing, it was MY idea. Erect a statue or something. At least a plaque…

I’m thoroughly enjoying my current listen, “Everyone Worth Knowing” by Lauren Weisberger. But I was quite surprised when one of the parties that the main character organizes is to promote the Blackberry mobile phone/pda from Research in Motion. Huh? I thought… usually authors use generic companies in books, just like they usually make up fictitious US presidents or Middle Eastern countries. What is going on here?

I suspect that product placement has gone from movies and television into books now. There was no particular reason for the party sponsor to be someone esoteric like Research in Motion. It would have made more sense in fact for it to be a company like Apple, famous for its movie product placements. I suspect that now we’re going to see characters drinking Snapple, visiting Home Depot, and renting audiobooks at Simply Audiobooks. Or maybe not.

Maybe Lauren just loves her Blackberry.

Jon Bischke over at Learn out Loud had a great blog posting on how rapid change in media consumption is creating the need for us media distributors to look at business in a new way. Looking at things in a new way, especially in delivering better and innovative services to our customers is always a good idea. But I want to comment on the rapidity of change.

The press in all forms hypes new technologies, and predicts the imminent demise of the current way of doing things. They’re almost always wrong. This isn’t because they’re stupid – it’s because writing about new things is interesting. It attracts eyeballs. Talking about process improvements and gradual change is boring, even though it’s the reality of nearly all businesses.

In this much-hyped era of online delivery of digital content, much is made of the demise of old school technology like CDs and (shudder) Tapes. Look at the statistics though. 30% of audiobook consumption is still in Tape form, 24 YEARS after the introduction of CDs as a mainstream technology. Spoken Word direct download became commercial either in 1998, or 2003, depending on whether you think iTunes is what kicked it off (vs Audible).

Here’s the real stat – only 3% of the commercial music business is download, even five years after this industry supposedly got decimated by the availability of download. Yes we can make all sorts of arguments about pirating and its effects. But industries and formats just don’t change that fast.

That doesn’t diminish Jon’s point of course that the audiobook industry should be innovative and customer focused. It’s just not because direct download is about to dominate. This past year, CDs had more new customers than download did. And that’ll be true for awhile yet.