Simply Audiobooks Inc.

I haven’t posted for a few weeks, but I have a good excuse. On November 10th, directly as a result of the stress involved in writing this blog (I propose), I managed to have a myocardial infarction-ish event. Better known as a heart attack. Oh my. Now now… no need to send flowers, or money. It was a minor one, thankfully, more of a wake-up call than anything immediately serious.

In the aftermath, a friend got me a book by Dr. Dean Ornish,  this one happened to be “Reversing Heart Disease” and had loads of information on cholesterol, stress, yoga, ….  Much of it I’m planning to ignore, but the section on stress was informative as heck. I had no idea how bad this stuff is for you. Much worse than chocolate. Especially if you worry a lot about how much chocolate you eat.

At least one thing I always did right – I manage my commuting stress by listening to audiobooks. Except for the Stephen King ones, they manage to make me feel warm and fuzzy even at the end of a 10 mile traffic backup.

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’re already a big fan of audiobooks. Pat yourself on the back. You’re diminishing the chances of having a future “health impairing event”.

Back when we started this business, I just assumed everyone knew what an audiobook was. As you can tell from some of my previous posts, this is a) not true because people call them different things, and b) not true because some people live in audiobook-less caves.

And now another term – talking books. Big thing in the UK. Virtually unheard of in the US or Canada. I find the term funny, but then I find much of what the Brits do funny (in a very good way). It’s as if books on cd or books on tape has been endowed with human abilities, much like talking frogs (Kermit), talking lions (Simba), and talking toilet paper (Sharmin, I think).

I wonder what these talking books say? Particularly to each other when we’re not around… maybe “My index is bigger than your index”, or “look, over there! Gotcha…”, or “I have to make a bet, who’s your bookie? Get it, booookie. Haaaa haa ha.” After all, there’s no reason to think that even audiobooks would have a good sense of humour.

We recently acquired an audiobook store. A real live physical bricks and mortar hunk of real-estate in the middle of downtown Toronto. It’s one of the most successful audio book stores in the world, due mainly to its location in the Toronto financial district, with lots of walking traffic around it. Part of the reason for getting it was to enable us to set up a Canadian shipping centre for audiobook sales. We’ve been doing sales in the US for over a year now, so it was about time. Canadians aren’t a violent people, but we did get a lot of angry letters.

Now here’s the interesting part. I stand around inside the store once in a while just watching people, and I’m amazed at how much people are willing to pay for audiobooks on CD in a store. I mean, they’re cheaper pretty much anywhere online, cheaper if you download them, and a LOT less expensive if you rent them. But these people walk in with their credit cards, wander the aisles, then pull out a gold card and several times a day we see orders of $300 or $400 from a single person.

Clearly, there is some benefit people get from shopping in the physical world. I can think of a few – immediate availability being the big one. But also being able to browse by walking and looking instead of clicking. And the satisfaction of holding the product in your hand. I think that means that retail is going to be around for a long long time. Because I can’t see any way of duplicating these things via websites and mail shipping. Until we get holospheres, or direct mind implants, or …?

Now when I hear about the internet taking over the world, or the latest technology being adopted overnight (e-books are a recent hype target), I think about standing around the store watching people browsing. Some things change – the neighbourhood book store is endangered by the superstore, and people listen to audiobooks in addition to paper books. But wandering around a physical store, chatting with a clerk, running your hands across a shelf. Maybe that’s always going to be around. Online is going to continue to grow like crazy, thankfully for us, but it’s nice to know some things won’t change.

The November 2006 newsletter is now online on the Simply Audio Blog. Click this text to go to it now.

Enjoy!