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FEBRUARY’S BIG NEWS MAY HAVE BEEN Apple’s quiet release of new higher capacity iPhones and iPod touches, but the more interesting news was Amazon’s acquisition of Audible.
It’s made no secret of trying to build a digital content business to rival Apple’s iTunes Store, and for a while it looked like it was doing quite well. Music industry bosses, worried about Apple’s influence over their one-time sole preserve, had been using Amazon as a stick with which to beat the Mac maker. In offering the online bookstore exclusive deals, they dealt Apple a bloody nose – in terms of PR if nothing else – but never really achieved their goal.
Apple neither blinked nor flinched, and the only time it deigned to seriously consider variable priced downloads was when one publisher, EMI, gave it something in return: higher-quality tracks free from DRM.
Amazon probably thought it was getting somewhere until Apple announced deals with all the major movie studios last month, which will revitalise its Store, and make the music world think twice about playing hard and fast with what is now destined to become the biggest online shop of them all. Perhaps bigger, even, than Amazon.
So Amazon faced two problems. One was the prospect of a swift downturn in its downloads business, and the other was the distinctly mediocre public response to its newly-launched Kindle eBook and audiobook player. Failure on both counts couldn’t be countenanced, and so snapping up Audible was the most logical move.
It would give it a ready-made, recognised online downloads store, guarantee content for its player, in the same way that the iTunes Store guarantees content for the iPod. It would also give it the opportunity – a theoretical one, if nothing else – to turn the world’s biggest online audiobook store into a proprietary service whose relationship to Kindle mirrors that of iTunes and the iPod.
I doubt this would happen in the short term, and it may never happen, but if it did it would be a serious blow to iPod-owning fans of the spoken word, whose choice would be limited to podcasts of highly variable quality, and would suddenly find the world of language courses, text books and the best classic and modern literature almost inaccessible.
An Amazon/Kindle/Audible partnership is more than a shot across Apple’s bow; it’s a potent force it can’t afford to ignore.
