When Amazon Became The King of Audiobooks

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If you are a fan of audiobooks, the odds are that Amazon is your preferred place to shop. Of all the ways Amazon has come to dominate the book market, especially in the digital arena, its share of audiobook sales probably represents its most formidable preeminence.

According to recent surveys, more than 60% of audiobooks were downloaded to digital devices. And nearly all of those came from Audible, one of Amazon’s best acquisitions. Amazon also owns Brilliance audio, the biggest producer of CD based audiobooks.

Audiobooks are now well over a billion dollar business. The stats clearly show that Amazon retains a far larger piece of that revenue than any other retailer in the world, offline or online.

Amazon is having an especially good run lately compared to major competitors in the book trade. Whether the reason is the popularity of Kindle in its various reading and tablet forms or the Amazon discounts for most of its millions of books, consumers seem to be increasingly conditioned, or even habituated to the convenience of Amazon's one click technology, its efficiency in service, and the vast scale of what it has to offer.

Of course, it doesn’t stop here, as Amazon expands its marketing horizons incessantly.

Audiobooks are prime example Amazon’s flexible marketing strategy and multi-channel approach toward world domination. Amazon acquired Audible in 2008 for about $300 million and now features well over 100,000 titles.

Audible offers a membership model, which can amount to substantial savings over a la carte pricing. According to recent claims, Audible has been producing more than 10,000 recorded works per year.

Donald Katz, Audible's founder and CEO, said the company employed 2,000 actors to narrate books last year. He speculated that his company was probably the largest single employer of actors in the New York area. Although the Actors' Guild was unable to calculate the exact number, it did confirm that audio narration is “plentiful . . . (and) also lucrative enough to allow many of its members to survive on it.”

If you’d like to learn more about big and popular acquisitions of Amazon and other big companies, take a look at the infographic below.