Price: I would expect the market price for audio book distribution to be much lower if there was real competition. Right now ACX charges 60% of the value of an audiobook just to list it on Audible.com, and other sites can’t really compete on price since listing it elsewhere causes the writer to lose money. At this point, I expect anyone listing on other sites to be doing it for ideological reasons, so there’s no reason for Audible’s competitors to compete on price either (since they can’t win).
Features: Audible and Kindle are both laughably bad apps[1] for how insanely profitable they are, but consumers can’t switch apps because the books they want are only on Audible. If Audible had to actually compete for customers, I expect that their apps would be significantly better.
Audible’s pricing model is also a scam[2] and I expect that would be hard to maintain under real competition too.
The Kindle app has trouble downloading ebooks, and fails to load previously-downloaded ebooks about 25% of the time. To fix this, you have to open and close the app a few times, or delete the book and download it again.
On the consumer-side, they charge you a monthly fee for extremely valuable monopoly money that they burn if you ever cancel. On the writer-side, they decide how much to pay you, and if a customer pays with credits, you get very little money.
Probably both.
Price: I would expect the market price for audio book distribution to be much lower if there was real competition. Right now ACX charges 60% of the value of an audiobook just to list it on Audible.com, and other sites can’t really compete on price since listing it elsewhere causes the writer to lose money. At this point, I expect anyone listing on other sites to be doing it for ideological reasons, so there’s no reason for Audible’s competitors to compete on price either (since they can’t win).
Features: Audible and Kindle are both laughably bad apps[1] for how insanely profitable they are, but consumers can’t switch apps because the books they want are only on Audible. If Audible had to actually compete for customers, I expect that their apps would be significantly better.
Audible’s pricing model is also a scam[2] and I expect that would be hard to maintain under real competition too.
The Kindle app has trouble downloading ebooks, and fails to load previously-downloaded ebooks about 25% of the time. To fix this, you have to open and close the app a few times, or delete the book and download it again.
On the consumer-side, they charge you a monthly fee for extremely valuable monopoly money that they burn if you ever cancel. On the writer-side, they decide how much to pay you, and if a customer pays with credits, you get very little money.