Brent Kearney

Sharing Audible Audiobooks & Other Ebooks

Posted on: August 4th, 2010 @ 12:49

Audible and other eBook companies are presently missing a golden opportunity to substantially increase their subscriptions, and therefore sales, and to dramatically reduce piracy. By far, the best marketing any business can get is by word of mouth. Why not make it easy for customers to recruit their friends?

The best way to do that is to allow what every book buyer has been doing since the printing press was invented: after they read a book, they lend it, or give it, to a friend. With a small investment, Audible & friends could add some functionality to their infrastructure which would turn their current customers into a marketing gold mine. The new features would be similar to how the big newspapers currently enable sharing of their content.

NYT-sharing

Suppose that I just finished reading/listening to a book I know my friend Sam would really love. I want to lend it to Sam, just like I would if I had spent my hard-earned cash on a bound paper copy of the book instead. Only it’s even easier with an eBook: I login to my Audible account, and click on “My Library”, which lists the books I’ve purchased. Beside each book is a “Share this book” button. I click it, and a form pops up into which I can enter a friend’s name and email address, and a personal message from me. I can also select the amount of time that I want to lend it for: 30, 60, 90 days – or indefinite.

Sam receives an email which appears to come from me (so it avoids spam filters), but is actually a professionally formatted message from Audible, which includes my personal note and link to the audio book. Here’s the revolutionary part: Sam can click the link to download the audio book for free. I’ve already paid for it, after all. My friend just needs to click the link, which automatically creates a new Audible account using his name and email address, and he is taken to his own “My Library” page, which lists the book that I have lent him.

I should point out that it would be a blunder to attempt to force Sam to enter his credit card before he’s ready to buy something. At this point, his trusted relationship is only with his friend, me, not entirely with Audible, yet.

When I “shared” the book, I authorized my friend to download and listen to the book for the specified period of time. During that time, like a paper book, I can no longer access the book on my devices. I’m “deauthorized” until my friend returns the book. When my friend is done with the book, he can click a link in his new account to return it to me, or he can just wait for the lending time to expire, after which the book will automatically be reauthorized for me & my devices again.

Chances are pretty high that my friend Sam could be enticed to buy some new Audio books of his own, using his new account. Especially knowing that like a real book, he can give it, or lend it, to friends when he’s done with it, without the need to resort to DRM removal software, which can be a major hassle.

There are a lot of possibilities with this scheme, and I leave it as an exercise for the reader to fill them out. Comments welcome!

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  • http://brent.kearneys.ca Brent

    Maybe Audible just isn’t very good with the intarwebs:

    audible

  • robert

    The Barnes and Noble ebook reader (and apps) has this feature.
    As an Audible subscriber I hope that they take note and add
    the feature soon. (before I cancel my account and jump ship to B and N)

  • Sarah

    I completely agree with this line of thinking. I think it is a big missed opportunity for content providers and publishers.

  • Leif

    I would take it a step further and say that whatever your note to Sam is it goes public as a review. I would also subsequently impose that the sharer rate the book before they are able to share it. If it’s good enough to go to a friend it’s good enough that you can do the author and voice talent and sound techs a favour and promote it.

    Also, I would probably limit it’s use. NOT 30+ days. 3-14 max (depending on what Audible worked out with the publisher). Those are library rules and they’re good. Want to borrow it longer, your friend or you can pay $1/day. And you would obviously not be able to play it while it’s on loan.

    Making it super convenient to loan or share books from Audible.com for free should be an option, but it shouldn’t come without a few more strings than are mentioned above. It would definitely be fairer to the artists involved IMO.

    L

  • katel

    This is an AWESOME solution… I wish that it were in force now.

  • http://brent.kearneys.ca Brent

    This guy is spot-on: audible is doing many things wrong: Why Audible.com is Failing. The comments on this post are informative too. One guy got around the lack of sharing feature by purchasing an iPod shuffle, then lending that to his friends.

  • A

    Yes! Please! It is sooo annoying not to be able to share a good book with a friend you know will love it too. Itunes will let you share with other Itunes users. That’s why I have started buying audio books via them.

    • http://brent.kearneys.ca Brent Kearney

      Are you talking about the iTunes Sharing feature that allows you to share content on the same network? If so, that is totally inadequate – what if you want to lend to someone outside of your house? Or you want to turn your computer and/or iTunes off?

  • http://twitter.com/alex_androv Alexander Alexandrov

    Great idea… Another possibility would be to have “shared book pool” for a limited set of people. Suppose Alice and Bob are married and have a child Christoph who is in his early twenties. All three members of the family are likely to have their own credit cards and their own amazon accounts. So, why not allow them to read each other’s books? After all, a good paperback lying around the house is likely to be read by all three members.

    Unfortunately sometimes I feel that the people in charge of the business strategy are too short sighted and too scared to propose these types of ideas.

    I just subscribed to audible but won’t hesitate to cancel my account if an alternative service supporting some limited form of digital sharing comes around.

    • http://brent.kearneys.ca Brent Kearney

      Since I’ve written this post, many of the eBook sellers have implemented some kind of sharing, including Amazon. However, it is an opt-in service, so unless the author chooses to allow sharing, it won’t appear as an option in the Kindle software.

      That’s reasonable, but I wish it was opt-out instead of opt-in, that way the authors wouldn’t have to do anything special. None of the dozen or so Kindle books I have now show an option for sharing.

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