From ITWorld Canada:
Audible is launching its first Canadian dedicated service, marking the first time the Amazon subsidiary is launching a bilingual website.
Audible.ca is live as of today, Sept. 13, offering 300,000 audiobooks and other audio content, including 100 new titles from Canadian authors in English and French. What differentiates it from its U.S. counterpart, audible.com, is that now Audible is specifically curated for English speaking and French speaking Canadians.
“A tremendous amount of writers and authors come out of Canada, and we want to recognize Canada as a unique destination with multiple cultures,” said Chris Cooper, head of international at Audible, over the phone with IT World Canada. “We want to really service Canadians with an authentic Canadian approach.”
In order to do that, Audible has specifically curated both the English and French versions of the site so that users won’t just see a translated version of the same page. This is the first time curation by language is being offered in a market, and the company has earmarked $12 million CAD over the next three years to invest in Canadian writers and voices.
“You can go back and forth with ease and just recognize the other cultures. We want to be part of the social fabric and be respectful; be a respectful visitor and resident and realize that there are cultural differences,” said Cooper.
. . . .
The launch of a dedicated Canadian service comes at just the right time, as last week Toronto-based Kobo launched its own audiobook service that will feature audiobooks from a range of publishers that Kobo already works with on the e-books front. Similarly, Kobo members can buy audiobooks individually or by subscribing to a monthly service for one download per month.
. . . .
Kobo CEO Michael Tamblyn, in an email to IT World Canada said Audible isn’t really new competition since it’s been around since the 1990s. Besides, Kobo has already grappled with the competition posed by Amazon.
“Kindle was the only game in town for eBooks when we started, and yet we grew to be the dominant player in Canada by focusing on Canadian authors and publisher partnerships, and ultimately, Canadian readers,” he said. “We believe there is a huge playing field here for audiobooks.”
Link to the rest at ITWorld Canada and thanks to Tudor for the tip.
In case Canadian visitors to TPV didn’t catch it in the OP, Audible understands you’re not the part of the United States that is located somewhere north of Montana. Audible understands that some of you like to speak English and others prefer French.
Audible is also sensitive to the hockey and non-hockey elements of Canadian culture and knows Molson is not the Canadian Budweiser.
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I call shenanigans on aboot. I don’t know what part of Canada he’s from, but the Ontario folks really do say “aboot.” Listening to the magician on stage say “take it oot” instead of “take it out” to his assistant was how I realized that Boblo Island (an amusement park) was on the Canadian side of the Detroit River. This is also a “tell” that a coworker or classmate is Canadian, even apart from them celebrating Thanksgiving in the wrong month 😉
My father is from B.C. No “aboot’ in our house. But I did grow up with ‘herb’ tea, not ‘erb’, chesterfields, tea cozies, garbage (with a soft g on the end), and tortiere for Christmas Eve dinner! (Although that last might just be a family thing) 🙂 I think a lot of the Canadianisms people twit about are as much regional as things in the states.
Agreed about the regionalisms; I suspected as much. Now I just looked up that tortiere. It sounds tasty; I’ll have to put that on my must-try-to-make list. My mother and I collude on Christmas dinner and we don’t always do turkey. We like trying new ideas and I think I made braised spare ribs last time.
Love the Captain Kirk version from Just for Laughs (lots of Montreal in-jokes).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKLkmTz-kJw
And then there’s the one from the Vancouver olynmpic games (sorry, I couldn’t find a better visual quality)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGlG5jqAmqc
There’s also Jim Carey, who grew up in Canada.
https://youtu.be/2ic3xNfEP_o
audible is a great way to lose money, as they will give your stuff away fror free to get people to sign up for their service. So they get membership, you get nada in compensation, and yea a few more people hear your stuff , but easy to see where the money is going on the author’s backs.
People are listening to podcasts in droves. Not sure about audio steaming or otherwise. Audible is not about podcasts, lybsyn and itunes are.
one can see, better to own the hive than to be a ‘worker’ bee whose work disappears into free over and over.
Can only say: read the contract VERY carefully. They probably tell you in advance what they can/will do. And then just figure the worst case.
Does that apply for all audiobooks, including the ones you create yourself? Or only the ones they participate in making?
Be sure to watch to the very end.