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.

Now, instead of that long and impossible-to-memorize URL, you can find my facebook page at facebook.com/jamelcato

Here are the things I like:

• You can sign-up with just a username and password. No email required. No forms to fill out.
• It’s easy to find people with similar literary interests.
• The excellent search and browsing features.
• The best use of tagging on the Internet.
• The recommendation engine is way better than Amazon’s version.
• The Zeitgeist page, which features every imaginable statistic about the LT community. As a data analyst, I have to love this. Some of the statistics are remarkable, like the guy with over 14,000 books in his library. One guy. 14,000 books.

Here are the things I don’t like:

• It can be a lot of work, at least initially. Part of the reason this post doesn’t link to my LT profile is because I haven’t finished inputting the hundreds of books I own.
• The site has a lot of features, but there’s no Help section. And the FAQ page is almost impossible to find.
• While I’m enamored with the idea of networking with fans of my favorite authors/books, I’m not sure I want to let the whole world know what’s in my personal library in order to do that. I realize I could take the Spiderman approach and hide my identity behind a clever username like Not-Jamel-007, but then I can’t link my LT profile to any site that includes my real name—like this blog.

Notwithstanding these few minor annoyances, I have to say that LibraryThing is my favorite site right now.

But it’s not a panacea. Over 200,000 members and only 5 of them thought A Little Yellow Dog was worthy of five stars. Go figure.