Audible founder Don Katz talks about the state of audiobooks, competition from Spotify and the limits of shareholder capitalism
n the 25 years since Don Katz launched Audible as a pioneering audiobooks service, the audio space has become flooded with content. It’s easier than ever to record a podcast in your bedroom and reach a large number of listeners over social media.$300 million in 2008
In a Zoom interview, Katz reflected on the last two-and-a-half decades: from leaving a writing career to kickstart an audiobooks industry that did not yet exist; taking Audible from a public company into an Amazon subsidiary; and moving the company to Newark at a time when other companies were fleeing the city. Each of those moves has paid off: Audible consumers consumed nearly 4 billion hours of audio in 2022 across audiobooks, podcasts and theater productions, according to the company.
From him, I understood that the reason that Stephen Crane wrote like an American was because he listened to this incredible polyglot storytelling that brought together so many voices from so many worlds. Mark Twain wrote like an American because of his understanding of that culture. But on another level, we’ve been at this a long time. It’s harder than it looks to help people integrate a habit into their lives. They’ll certainly find this out.
The other thing that hugely affected me was the way people like Martin Luther King talked about what became the go-to move for corporations exhibiting any kind of social caring, which was to write a check to nonprofits and charities. The charity is fine. But if you don’t look at the headwaters of the cause—which we know now is institutionalized racism and a whole lot of other inequities—then you’re just going to be papering over core problems.
But what they didn’t necessarily grow up with is the background conversation of resumes and organizational language. That led to some fairly dire pre-COVID statistics of Black college graduates’ employment having a massive disparity to white college graduates. So now we’ve now gotten to the point of “curricularizing” organizational vocabulary.
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