> But again, I would buy a small fraction of the audiobooks I have purchased at full price.
I’ve got ~300 audible books in my library, and I can safely say I’d have bought exactly none of them at full price.
I’ve got ~300 audible books in my library, and I can safely say I’d have bought exactly none of them at full price.
The author seems disingenuous to propose that the retail price in audible is anything that anyone expects. I assume he’s not stupid and is aware of this so not bringing up this point is misleading.
It’s like if someone wrote a blog post enraged that BMG Record Club wasn’t paying them out a percent of retail prices without pointing out that BMG’s whole model was 10 CDs for a penny and then 2 for the price of one (or whatever the ridiculous price scheme was).
The way Audible book pricing works is a little byzantine. The "list" price of most titles is somewhere in the neighborhood of $50. Plus or minus.
But as a subscriber you're given one credit each month, for $15. So right there you can get the same title for much cheaper if it's your credit redemption.
But that's not all. If you buy the Kindle edition of a book, it's only $7.50 or so to add on narration with the purchase. The text copy of the title might be $9.99, so the total is still far less than the "naked" audiobook price.
I don't understand why they do it this way. Even if I'm out of credits, I can save $40 or so by getting the Kindle+Audio bundle vs. just the Audible version alone.
With that said, I do think I misinterpreted what they were saying, which was more speaking to the original outcome if full price than what they would do now regarding each book.
Credits with frequent 2-for-1 sales, £3 sales and £1 sales, there is just no reason to ever pay retail price on Audible.
If you don't like it, your job is to turn down that offer.
Sure, and disappear, because you're not listed by the bad deal company that has container-ships-of-money for marketing.
And you can put your spoken word content on eg Spotify or Youtube, too. There is competition.
Now they do also have sales where they sell books for like $5 or something; if those sales are not opt-in, of course that's a problem. But I have a hard time believing they're not opt-in.