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    Local content is Audible's big bet for India market

    Synopsis

    After hooking up millions of people in the country on its Prime video entertainment and ecommerce shopping platform, Amazon launched its audiobook company Audible in India this month.

    ET Bureau
    MUMBAI: Jeff Bezos is coming after Indians who spend hours driving, grocery shopping or simply running on the treadmill, with their favourite stories and in their languages.

    After hooking up millions of people in the country on its Prime video entertainment and ecommerce shopping platform, Amazon launched its audiobook company Audible in India this month.

    Audible.in will offer a broad selection of more than 200,000 full-length audiobooks and original programs, including a curated selection of 400 Audible-exclusive English titles by leading Indian authors, including Rabindranath Tagore, Hussain Zaidi and Shashi Tharoor.

    “Everything about India indicates that Audible should be tremendously successful. But I look at success as the numbers of listeners who are as habituated like our global customers, who give us 2 hours a day on the days they listen in,” said Don Katz, CEO at Audible.

    Audible is reaching out to Indian producers, creators and artists to broadcast their work on its platform.

    Its parent, Amazon, owns a library of books of Indian authors such as Amish Tripathi, Ashwin Sanghi, Rashmi Bansal, Devdutt Patnaik and Ravi Subramanian through its acquisition of Westland Ltd, a local publisher, in 2016. The fifty-year-old publisher had books in the top 10 of the top 50 charts in the country. The company also has books in Hindi.

    Audible said it already had about “tens of thousands” of listeners who logged from India into the US website and mobile application to listen to its content. It sees a potential audience base of “hundreds of millions” of users in India that can be captured by content in local languages.

    India is the 8th country Audible has entered after establishing itself in the US, banking on India’s English-speaking population, a large creative community, and the rising crossover of artists between mediums of films, theatre, home videos and podcasts.

    “Professional creative community in India has come to a point where it has the best stuff we have ever seen. On top of that, you have objective circumstances like the rising economy, and a whole lot of time that they waste in traffic and doing other stuff when they can’t look at the screen,” Katz said.

    Audible was launched by journalist Katz in 1995 before it was bought over by Bezos for $300 million in cash in 2008. In the decade since, Audible has dominated the audio books market in the US. Now, Walmart and Google are entering the field.

    Audible will continue to keep its brand separate from Amazon’s in India as well.

    “We have done very well associating with Amazon but keeping the brand separate. There is no reason to change the brand, particularly when people think Amazon is a great ecommerce company,” Katz said. “We coordinate with Amazon on anything that makes sense. We invent technology together, we work together, but it is not one of those subsidiary environments where it is command and control.”

    Audio book sales globally totalled $2.5 billion in 2017, the most recent year for which data are available, according to the Audio Publishers Association. That’s about 19% higher from the previous year and almost three times the market size when Amazon bought Audible.

    Audible accounts for about 41% of all audio books sold globally, according to researcher Codex Group LLC.
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    The Economic Times

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