Audiobooks

“To really understand something, you gotta spend a lot of time with it. It can't be, I think people are always looking for shortcuts, you know, and they're like, oh, I read this on three X speed on audiobook, and you're like, I don't know if that's, I don't kno…”

“You must sever your audio rights on every single book you do. An audio book is like having the world's single best rental property at a beach town. And there's no cost because it's one digital file and it will be around in perpetuity.”

“About 40% of book consumption nowadays is voice, audio books.”

“We didn't know before we started. If podcasting and later audio books would be cannibalistic to the other media types or not, but it turns out it's not.”

“I'm hoping that audiobooks is a mainstream phenomenon as it is in Scandinavia, where, you know, it's almost as many people who listen to music listen to audiobooks.”

“In the East, everyone's on a train, so they're on their phone, so they're scrolling. In the West, everyone's driving, so they're listening, and that's the reason podcasts and audiobooks.”

“Publishing really hasn't kept up. It's a very legacy type of a business, and they do so well because they've been around for so long, so they're very entrenched in what they do, and they make some money, but they're safe as far as business goes. Very slow to a…”

“For instance, in Germany, unbeknownst to us, but one of the sort of crazy things that ended up happening was just people started uploading audio books because it turns out that these music labels actually own a bunch of audio book rights.”

“But the better way to think about audio books and podcasting is it's really around a business model mostly. So one way to frame it instead would be Podcasting is ad supported audio and audiobooks is paid audio.”

“Our view is we eventually think audiobooks should be much, much larger than what it is today. Hundreds of millions of people who are actually listening to audiobooks because the content is great, rather than today what's tens of millions of people.”

“I don't think it's necessarily a good thing to have information come at you that fast because you're in a hurry to get it. I think it kind of creates this expectation of everything coming at you fast. I don't think that that's necessarily that healthy either.”

“First of all, it's actually interesting to know for folks that aren't totally plugged into the publishing industry, audiobooks are huge. It's like, they're growing like gangbusters.”

“And to my knowledge, it's the first time that like the creative output of a machine learning system has been included in an audio book.”

“And the audio books, you don't make hardly any money because they will not let you set your price. They set the price for you. And it's pretty much not on how good your book is. It's just how long it is. It's just, you know, it's a horrible way to decide value…”