5 Ways to Fix Audible.com in 2012

Even though Audible.com has all the usual marks of a monopoly (sky-high prices, mediocre customer service, little innovation, etc.) I continue to subscribe because I spend a lot of time in my car and it’s the only game in town when it comes to mass market audiobooks. Even the audiobooks sold on iTunes come from the Audible catalog.

Instead of lamenting Audible’s flaws or theorizing about the lack of competition in the audiobook market, I’m going to list a few things that would make the service better:

• Provide a way to “follow” your favorite authors. Currently the only way to find out if your favorite author has a new title available is to go to the Audible site and manually search, which is a gigantic fail. A feature like this would be trivial to implement with Atom or RSS feeds.
• Social Network Integration. It’s unfathomable in today’s world that Audible has no integration with any of the major social networks. If you have a great listening experience, there’s no way to automatically share it on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social network. Audible doesn’t even support Shelfari, a social network for book lovers that’s part of its own corporate family. What’s the deal with that? Combined with its dated 90’s style site design, this gives Audible the aura of an uncool, isolated island.
• Listener Choice Awards. How about an award program based on customer votes? It’s hard to believe Audible’s claims about how much it values feedback from its “literate” customers when it doesn’t have a single award or “best of” list not chosen by its own editors (whom we never meet). I can’t be the only one to notice that many of the titles its editors grace with their blessings have customer ratings in the 3’s (out of 5). This we-tell-you-what-to-like approach has always struck me as a little condescending and elitist. It’s especially stark when juxtaposed against Amazon.com (Audible’s parent company) where EVERYTHING is based on customer ratings.
• Fix the My Library feature. Currently each individual part of a single audiobook is listed and counted in your Library like it’s a separate audiobook. This is highly annoying when navigating or managing your library. Please fix this or at least allow customers to collapse the individual parts.
• Offer a Subscription Plan for Commuters. I saved the best (or worse?) for last. I’m fairly certain that people with long commutes are Audible’s biggest customers. The rub is that if your commute is an hour one way, it will take you only a week to finish the typical audiobook. After you spend the one or two credits Audible gives you under its current subscription plans, you’re left with the choice of either waiting a month for your new credit(s) or paying Audible’s outrageous retail prices. This choice, which I face nearly every month, is the thing I dislike most about Audible and will most likely be the reason Audible loses me as a customer. I would be much happier with a plan that offered a special discount for your 2nd or 3rd purchase in a month or a special discount on audiobooks longer than 20 hours for monthly subscribers.

Based on what I’ve read about CEO Jeff Bezos, I’m surprised that Amazon paid a third of a billion dollars to acquire Audible without insisting on any of these things.