Comments on: Download the Little Brother audiobook

By: idiosynchronic

idiosynchronic — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 17:47:00 +0000

Great book – I’m still recommending it to people – but I just don’t like Kirby’s pacing. I’d pay $50 for a new reading by an appropriately kinetic teenager.

By: geekd

geekd — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 17:50:00 +0000

I was thinking the same thing. I read a lot, and I was recently considering getting some audio books to listen to during my daily commute. But if they cost $20 a pop, that’s a non-starter. I can get 2.5 regular priced kindle books for that.

By: ookluh

ookluh — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 13:15:00 +0000

I meant the cost to buy, not produce. Don’t believe me? Go to Audible and choose an audio book and then go to Amazon and check out the prices for the same book.

In my case the first book on Audible’s website was Phantom by Jo Nesbø. Audible price: $31.50 discounted to $22.05. Amazon hardcover price: $25.95 discounted to $14.93.

As noted, Little Brother is DRM free. Audible books are NOT DRM free.

I’m not making any value judgements on what should or should not be the case for pricing of audio vs. print, just that it seems to consistently be more expensive to buy the audiobook.

By: Paul Renault

Paul Renault — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 11:48:00 +0000

”..audiobooks often cost more than the print version.”

If the audiobook is sold as CDs or tapes maybe compared to a print version. But as a digital file?

If you had said: “The audio version of a book costs more to produce than the text version.”, I’d agree. Assuming that the costs of producing the audio version included the cost of writing the book. But that’s already being ‘paid for’ by the text editions, then the cost to produce the audio version is probably less than the cost to produce the text version. As an exercise, compare the work involved in reading an audio version vs. translating a book into another language.

But once it’s in digital form, the cost to distribute either version is almost zero.

By: Barton Alion

Barton Alion — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 07:16:00 +0000

yes it is a good one

By: ookluh

ookluh — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 07:13:00 +0000

In my experience, audiobooks often cost more than the print version. $20 for an audiobook is pretty cheap.

I’m not sure if your first question is rhetorical, but I guess the answer would be that if you really liked the book and you want to hear the audiobook, you should buy it.

By: Jake0748

Jake0748 — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 04:49:00 +0000

Or not to be a grumpy, get off my lawn guy, but what if you already bought the book as an actual book? And really dug it by the way. But Twenty bucks? I didn’t pay that much for the dead tree version.

By: Fred Richardson

Fred Richardson — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 03:37:00 +0000

Ok. That’s great and all, but what if you already bought it in another format? In my case Kindle…