Less than 24 hours after Audible — the audiobook publisher and retailer currently owned by Amazon — is launched in India at a glitzy event at the Royal Opera House in Mumbai, I sit down for a phone call with Donald Katz, Founder and CEO. This week’s launch means that Indian customers now have access to over 2,00,000 English-language audiobooks and original content, including 400 exclusive titles by local authors. And Katz is the high-profile, sneaker-wearing, start-up loving founder behind it all.
“I was most excited to talk to you,” he starts, going on to ask me about my background in theatre. “Are you aware of the things we’re doing with playwrights, and of our theatre fund?” he asks.
I am momentarily stumped, wondering if Katz — named one of America’s Top 25 Disruptive Leaders (by Living Cities ) — has come better prepared for this interview than I have. But it is also not a surprise. He credits his past as an “inquisitive journalist” (he has served as a contributing editor for publications like Rolling Stone and Esquire ) with giving him sharp observational skills, incredible honesty and a desire to “find the truth”. That, combined with his interest in early-stage start-ups, has helped make his 23-year-old company one of the largest success stories of technology in the creative space.
Famous voices
From Anne Hathaway ( The Wonderful Wizard of Oz ) to Kate Winslet ( Matilda, among others), Audible is replete with celebrity narrators, and the Indian platform is no different. The showstopper at the launch this week was a rendition of Hussain Zaidi and Jane Borges’ Mafia Queens of Mumbai , the 2011 book about the female doyens in Mumbai’s underworld, narrated by actors Radhika Apte, Kalki Koechlin and Rajkummar Rao.
But to call Audible just an audiobook seller would severely limit its vast scope. It has revived plays, commissioned new works and has convinced established authors like Michael Lewis to bypass print and go straight to audio. Above all, the company has helped make audio books cool again.
“I'm just excited about customising the cause of the creative community throughout,” says Katz, about this remarkable journey. “You see how we have branched out into so many realms of the professional creative class.”
Gaining momentum
He admits that the rise of Audible is “non-obvious. It’s not a super-fast, interactive, short-form experience”. But he is also able to explain the acceptance of the medium. “As a writer, I realised we’re all pretty much writing to the same, fairly smart, sophisticated person who is precisely the person who doesn’t have a lot of time,” he says.
The idea with Audible was to give people the opportunity to consume quality content. After the 2008 merger, users were able to login to Audible with their Amazon credentials. Along with the other pioneers of the space (hello, podcasters), it has successfully offered audio as a content solution that fits in with the busy-ness of modern life. Commutes, elliptical machines, laundromats — all perfect settings for a good (audio) book.
Local advantage
Audible’s global expansion is slow and calculated, placing great emphasis on local context. On audible.co.jp, for instance, audiences can listen to anime actors performing dramatic recreations of manga, “which is appropriate because the book culture there is very large”.
In India, the customisation (which includes a range of exclusive titles by Indian authors, such as Durjoy Datta’s first audio romance, The Last Boy to Fall in Love) , also extends to pricing. A subscription to the platform will set you back by ₹199 per month, while American customers typically pay around ₹1,090.
When I ask Katz about future plans for India, he and Shailesh Sawlani, the country GM for Audible India (ex-Uber), emphasise that an expansion to regional languages is definitely on the cards. “It’s just the beginning,” he concludes.
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