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amazon buys audible for $300M – Hugh McGuire Press "Enter" to skip to content

amazon buys audible for $300M

Published 2008-01-31 by Hugh

News from the commercial side of audiobooks, amazon dishes out 300 smackers for audible.com.

quick calculation:
-the article indicates that audible’s catalog is roughly 90,000 works
-@$300M for the kit, that’s about 3k/title
-so that makes librivox’s donation to the universe roughly worth (in grubby capitalist terms): 1200*3000 = $3.6 million.

let’s discount by 50% for our quirks, and, which puts us at $1.8 million, which sounds very low to me.

We’re adding about 70 books a month now to our catalog, so next year we should we “worth” twice that!

Not that we’re for sale (now or ever) but it’s … kinda interesting.

Read more posts about buisness or librivox

2 Comments

  1. Chris Hughes Chris Hughes 2008-01-31

    Another interesting calculation would be: how much value does Audible LOSE because a completly free alternative exists.

  2. Hugh Hugh 2008-01-31

    i contend that LibriVox actually helps Audible’s business because we create new appetites for audiobooks. audiobook sales are increasing, in large part (heh) because people can decide whether or not they like audiobooks, for free, with LV books. plus our catalog is very different than audible’s (old books vs recent best sellers).

    so i don’t think overall audible loses. i think it gains b/c librivox.

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