AMAZON / AUDIBLE DEAL: IS EG responsible?

As reported in The New York Times and by Cynthia Turner’s Cynopsis (see quote below), Amazon has purchased Audible for $300 Million.

Amazon acquired spoken word
digital audio company Audible
for $300 million, adding a potential new content provider for its
Kindle
digital book device. Audible has compiled a catalog of over 80,000
digital programs from famous authors and more than 520 content partners
including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Fresh Air and Charlie
Rose.
Audible.com, a big iTunes supplier, offers programs a la carte or
through
a monthly or annual subscription plan.

There are no comment by Amazon or Audible on how the deal came in to being. However, I can report that Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Donald Katz of Audible attended the recent EG conference (Entertainment Gathering) at the Getty, as did I.  As is the nature of such conferences there is a lot of casual talk between presentations. At one moment, after I had been part of a group talking with Bezos, I saw Katz turn to him, and say “should we talk about Audible?” and pull him aside.

The rest, as they say, is this morning’s news.

Donald Katz, as some of you may remember, was a successful magazine journalist (Rolling Stone, Esquire) and book author. I recall meeting him at some Esquire event in the late 1980s. Anyhow, at some point, he was writing a story about the digitization of spoken word and the opportunities on the horizon, when he thought — this could be a business! Tired of not really writing what he wanted to write the way he wanted to write it (Ah, the editing process!) he decided to give business a try. The result was Audible.com

As a sidenote, Katz told a funny story at EG. He attended the recent gathering in San Francisco of original contributors to Rolling Stone, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the magazine. They held an informal contest for who had sold out the most. He was high on the list. However, Jann Wenner won.

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