From The BBC:
Apple and Amazon have ended a deal that tied them into an exclusive contract for the supply and sale of audio books.
The deal was signed before 2008 when Amazon bought audio book supplier Audible, which had the Apple iBooks contract.
Pressure from anti-trust regulators in Germany and the European Commission led to the deal being abandoned.
. . . .
The terms of the agreement meant Audible could not offer audio books to any other company and Apple had to take audio books only from Audible.
The investigation into the Apple-Amazon arrangement over audio books was started by the German Federal Cartel Office in late 2015. It responded to complaints from German publishers who said the two tech giants were abusing their market dominance.
In Germany, said the publishers, more than 90% of all downloads of audio books were done via the Apple iTunes store or through the Amazon and Audible websites.
With the deal abandoned, Audible will now be able to supply firms other than Apple with audio books. In addition, Apple can now get audio books from other sources and sign up other publishers who can push their titles through its iTunes and iBooks outlets.
Link to the rest at BBC and thanks to Jan for the tip.
It’s good to see some praise for the German Federal Cartel Office for once. 😉
It is good news.
Good news.
Blutoothing my kindle to the car offers a great listening experience for audiobooks, but I love the idea of some competition. Oh yes, I do!
Good news all around.
It opens up a huge market to content producers who don’t want to deal with Audible. While the Kindle is a better reading experience that the iPhone, the iPhone is a better listening experience than the Kindle.
The Echo delivers a good listening experience.
Can you listen to the Echo on the train? Can you play the Echo through your car stereo? I suppose you could set up the Echo in your hotel room, but it’s a lot easier to just carry an MP3 player.
The Echo does away with earbuds. It allows you to listen, hands-free while you do other things. It has great sound quality. And it always keeps your place when you tell Alexa to stop. Your needs seem to require portability. Mine don’t.
And both our individual needs are irrelevant to the market.
When the market is examined, the most common way to listen to audio books is during a commute. The end of an exclusive content agreement on the default store (iTunes) of such a large installed device base (iPhones and iPods) is significant.
Only if Apple ‘does something’ with it. How many times hasve we seen them ‘not bother’ or only do it poorly when they can’t get their price-point? (ebooks?)
I !isten to audio books all the time on Overdrive on my iPhone and Fire. Content producers already can avoid Audible if they want to.
Competition in audiobooks is not a bad idea.
An audiobook chews up a lot of production time and money – and so supposedly justifies the cost and who gets the rewards.
However, the hours put into the book itself by the author are taken for granted somehow. And there are usually FAR more of those.
Seems backward.
“The deal was signed before 2008 when Amazon bought audio book supplier Audible, which had the Apple iBooks contract.”
So Amazon didn’t close the deal, they just bought the company that had.
Somehow I think this will help Amazon more than it does Apple.