Your Own Private Radio
Ah, yes, this is just the way they promised it. All those gee-whiz visions of yesterday’s tomorrows--when everything would be at our fingertips, a button push or voice action away.
However, in our quest for devices that will at once streamline our lives, intravenously, it seems, feed us more info and connect us in nanoseconds to places beyond imagination, the electronic information revolution has also made our days longer, more complicated and cluttered with obligation.
Donald Katz, the brain behind the latest Internet offshoot / hope-to-be must-have called Audible, feels your squeeze. He unloads a black bag the size of a small camera case with the precision of a doctor. From it, he plucks the most slender of instruments, one that barely fills the palm of his hand. Rx for the mind and soul.
This palm-sized audio system has been called variably an audio VCR or an Internet Walkman by tech writers grasping for simile. By offering a selection of books, newspaper and radio content, his system--the MobilePlayer in concert with his Web site (https://www.audible.com)--provides up to seven hours of programmable content of your daily, weekly, monthly choosing.
In short, Katz hopes that the Wayne, N.J.-based Audible Inc. will revolutionize the way you receive and consume information.
For demonstration’s sake, Katz plugs the device into a pair of computer speakers, but the idea is that someone using the device would plug headphones into the top to take it along on a morning run, or calibrate it to the car radio for the commute to work. Then, with his thumb, Katz touches a button on the face of the instrument that cleverly resembles an ear.
Out of the speakers squawks an electronic voice: “This is Audible. . . . This is the morning read from the Wall St. Journal. . . .”
The idea is that the playback emulates the way your eye might skitter across a newspaper page. “The Morning Read,” explains Katz, adjusting the volume, “is six key articles from the Journal as well as the What’s New section. You can skip around, basically, and decide what you want to read. You not only time-shift it to when you want to listen to it, but when you’re driving along you can use the technology to skip around.”
And again, with the press of his thumb, he virtually puts aside the pages of the daily news and instantly out of the speakers Frank McCourt intones the first few lines of his haunting bestselling memoir, “Angela’s Ashes,” in his transfixing Irish lilt.
Though by trade a journalist and author (“The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution of Sears” [Viking Press, 1997] and “The Nike Spirit in the Corporate World” [Random House, 1994]), Katz has been suddenly transformed from study-dwelling writer to tech-world prophet. Yet he doesn’t quite speak with a rabid, evangelist’s zeal. Rather, his tack is a more amiable, relaxed, sit-back-in-the-folds-of-the-couch confidence that once you see the device you’ll know: You need what I have.
“When you come back home, you stick it in the dock, and that hooks up to the computer, and all you have to do is push that blue button and it will [update] just what you’ve listened to,” Katz explains. “So, let’s say you’ve listened to three chapters of a Stephen King book and you’ve finished off a journal and you knocked off some lecture from Harvard and there’s still a piece [unread], it will update it all and top it off, so you won’t miss anything.”
How Do You Do? Katz Already Knows
Katz has made it his business, quite literally, to know who you are: You’re one of the 84 million people who drive alone to work. You’re one of the overextended baby boomers juggling job and family, who maybe pokes around on the Internet for research or leisure pleasures, or one of the 40 million out there who are considered mobile executives, which means that you spend 20% of your time on the road.
Audible, then, according to Katz, “is a whole new way to experience the time you can’t read and the time you can’t look at a screen.”
With 92 content partners, the company offers more than 16,000 hours of programming to choose from, ranging from the lectures of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman and scientist Stephen P. Hawking to the musings of cartoon office-tron Dilbert. You might download John Cleese’s reading of the Robert Pinsky translation of Dante’s “Inferno,” or you may be more in the mood for an Anne Beattie, Elmore Leonard or Chinua Achebe story or novel.
“There’s probably another 9,000 hours that will be delivered over the next year,” Katz says. “It just comes in all the time, and the library gets richer and richer. Your hard drive is your library. If something happens to it, we give you the whole thing over again. Basically, it’s yours forever. The only thing that you can’t do . . . is put it up on the Internet and give it away for free. From the very beginning, Audible created intellectual property security . . . since there were people whose lives and careers are based on the fact that this stuff was meant to be paid for.”
And they’ve made it as simple as the Web site instructions suggest: “Click. Hear.”
For $99 for the player, plus a varying content fee, many do so gladly:
Like Joseph Benedetto, a Philadelphia-based dentist who uses the system primarily to download radio programming to review at his leisure.
“The first thing that attracted me was Books on Tape,” he says. “I’m a bit of an insomniac, but I find that I prefer the texture and smell of the book, words on a page.”
However, says Benedetto, “I think they provide a very good service for people who are intellectually curious. I have a 40-minute commute to work when I can’t read. So I download [National Public Radio’s] ‘Fresh Air’ every day.” His yearly, self-tailored subscription also includes NPR’s “Science Friday” and “To the Best of Our Knowledge.”
In his year or so as an Audible-phile, Benedetto has traveled from the arts to the history of slavery.
“I’m 56 years old,” he says. “This has given me a chance to take interest in things that I couldn’t experience in my youth.”
Invention Came Out of Book Research
Like any grand adventure, Audible Inc. grew out of a series of what-ifs. That, and a stalled book project.
While doing research for a book on the digital media revolution, Katz became immersed in the subject.
“I became aware of a couple of things: One was that the Internet was the thing. The other thing was my college roommate explained that unlike music and video, spoken words can be compressed into very small data files. I began to think, if you could actually capture this audio, compress it, send it through computers and manage it, you could have a business that could touch thousands and millions of people.”
Apparently so. When Katz marched his freshman effort business plan around, some of the most powerful names in the industry--ATT Ventures, Thompson, Intel, Compaq and, most recently, Microsoft--were eager to offer their monetary support, he says. Many were impressed, as was Andy Huffman, who had already had a successful high-tech career before signing on with Audible in March. Sure, it was the freshness of the concept that attracted him, says Huffman, but he was also impressed by Katz and the company’s focus.
“They were the first to market with a mobile playback device. And the first to come up with a broad mix of content under exclusive arrangements and do it with a secure system,” Huffman says.
But will, or can, this newfangled gadget reshape the way we import, export and process information? Bill Dutton, professor of communication at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, thinks it’s possible but would be a challenge.
“There are issues about whether it will have a major market. You need access to a high-tech household--with a PC, an Internet connection and some knowledge about how to navigate,” he explains. “And one of the other issues is that the Internet itself . . . it’s been said that it is one of the greatest experiments ever in socialism in which so many people simply shared or gave away information . . . so there’s lots of free information. People are reluctant to pay for something else on top of their monthly Internet services. But services like Amazon.com are quite viable. And [Audible] does have the potential to open up a diversity of titles . . . when, in contrast, bookshelf space is at a bottleneck.”
But Dutton is more reserved in his assessment of just how revolutionary this “vision” of audibly scanning headlines and ingesting analysis of the day’s or week’s events is.
“Problem is,” he says with a chuckle, “you may reinvent radio.”
Working on Expanding Audible’s Repertoire
The next tier for Audible is concentrating on expanding not only its content but also uses of the system. Katz foresees business uses of the device in which Audible Inc. will encode and create audio text on the mobile players for a company to distribute to employees and clients.
Music and acquiring regional radio programming are also in the works as well as going after other traditional media and getting them to re-imagine the boundaries of their product’s form.
The idea, Huffman says, is to be able to turn the radio on and listen to exactly what you want to hear.
“That’s pretty powerful. We think we’re really on to a new paradigm and a new medium,” he says. “The broad challenge is to get enough mobile devices deployed--wisely and on the right kind of trenches.”
Katz agrees.
“You have about $200 billion worth of newspapers, magazines, business newsletters, business information . . . and all of that never had an audio delivery mechanism that was timely enough or particularized enough to an individual taste to get to people,” he says.
“And there’s a lot more coming. With the spoken word boom and poetry readings back in, the recovery movement where the meetings are basically storytelling, the memoir voice of narrative has totally taken over from the storytelling that I was doing,” says Katz, ears trained not just on the future, but, more important, on the present. “And here Audible is able to take bits and pieces of all of that--old and new--and hold it. A little Alexandria.”
A new icon for the modern age.
