I’ve just been browsing an interesting sale on audible.com: “10 Editors. 100 Books. 1 Low Price”. I found seven books I wanted to buy, all of which were offered for $4.95 each.

I selected seven of the books shown above. I was able to buy “The Art Of Racing In The Rain”, “Tilt-a-Whirl” and “The One and Only Ivan”.

When I tried to buy “The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry”, “Everything I Never Told You”, “The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August” and “The History Of Love”, I was told that they couldn’t be loaded into the cart.

So I went to find them individually. I found “Everything I Never Told You” in a different edition at $18.47, and “The Fifteen Lives of Harry August” in a different edition for $17.00. The others weren’t there.

What are audible doing here – other than pissing me off?

It’s very frustrating to shown an interesting book and then be told you can’t have it.

I checked out audible.co.uk. For some reason, their credits costs $2 less than audible.com. They only had the Claire North book. Which is the main reason that I have an audible.com account in the first place.

Amazon, who own audible, don’t seem to have the will to sort out the licensing to make audiobooks available globally. This is A $2bn market, growing at over 6%. Amazon is the dominant player, with the sales of their audible company growing by more than 30%. They are also the fastest route to market for many authors via their Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX).

So why are we still stuck with twentieth century licensing agreements?

And why does audible offer me things and then not let me buy them?

Ok. I feel better now. Rant Over. Normal services will be resumed shortly