Amazon to Buy Audible for $300 Million  

by Jim Milliot -- Publishers Weekly, 1/31/2008 6:30:00 AM

Amazon has increased its presence in the spokenword audio market, announcing this morning that it has agreed to acquire Audible, Inc. the country’s largest provider of digital downloads of spokenword audio. Amazon is paying $11.50 per share and assuming Audible’s outstanding stock-based awards, making the value of the deal about $300 million. Audible’s stock price was at $9.33 the day before that deal was announced, although its shares were selling at a 52-week high of $14.22 in November. The purchase is expected to close in the second quarter.

For the first nine months of 2007, Audible had sales of $78.8 million, an increase of 34% over 2006, and a net loss of $1.5 million compared to a loss of $7.7 million in the first nine months of 2006. Commenting on the purchase, Steve Kessel, senior v-p for worldwide digital media at Amazon, said Audible “offers the best customer experience, and the widest content selection in the industry.”

Founded by Don Katz, Audible has 160 employees and is based in Newark, N.J. It has about 80,000 audio programs comprising almost 200,000 hours, and is the exclusive distributor of spokenword audio to iTunes, owned by one of Amazon’s competitors, Apple. One issue that will need to be addressed is DRM. Audible sells all of its content with DRM protection, while Amazon has begun offering digital downloads of music without DRM.

This is Amazon’s second major strike in the spokenword audio space. Last year, the company acquired Brilliance Audio.