Amazon Buying Audible

Amazon has reached an agreement to acquire Audible Inc. in a deal worth about $300 million. Audible will remain in its Newark, N.J., headquarters under the direction of Don Katz. For the first nine months of 2007, Audible had sales of $78.8 million and a net loss of $1.5 million. This is Amazon's second major move in the spoken-word space. Last year, Amazon acquired Brilliance Audio.

Media sales, which include book sales, rose 29% last year in Amazon's North America media segment, hitting $4.63 billion. Worldwide media sales rose 31% in the year, to $9.24 billion. Total revenue for the entire company jumped 39% last year, to $14.84 billion, with net income up 150%, to $476 million.

The company also said that demand for the Kindle outpaced expectations and that it is scrambling to fill orders.

Haights Cross Communications is putting all its assets up for sale, including its spoken-word audio arm, Recorded Books. Recorded Books had sales of $64.3 million for the first nine months of 2007. Other units to be sold are Triumph Learning, publisher of test-prep and intervention materials, and Oakstone Publishing, which does continuing medical education titles. Haights is also continuing to look for a buyer for the el-hi supplementary unit Sundance/Newbridge Educational Publishing.

Total revenue at Indigo increased by 0.7% in the third quarter ended Dec. 29, 2007, reaching C$322.6 million. Sales at Indigo and Chapters superstores rose 0.6%, while sales at Coles' small format stores were down 1.7%. Online sales grew 8.0%, to C$30.9 million. Overall, the company's pretax earnings rose C$0.6 million, to C$41.6 million.

Oprah Winfrey announced last week that Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (Penguin) is the latest selection for her book club.

Susan Reiheld, a veteran Northern California sales rep, died of cancer on January 28. She was 64. Reiheld sold the BDD and Random House Inc. lists in the Bay Area for 16 years, until her retirement in December 2006. She previously worked for Pocket Books and Book People. In a memo to the Random House staff, her close friend Jaci Updike, senior v-p, director, adult sales, wrote, “I am just one among many colleagues, booksellers and our publishers who were energized by her championing of independent bookselling, her passion for books, and her great skill and unceasing enthusiasm for selling them.” Random will endow a scholarship in Reiheld's name to the ABA Winter Institute for a NCIBA bookseller.

In Spring '08 Fiction Debuts (Jan. 21), we incorrectly identified the editor of Blood Kin. She is Molly Barton, not Molly Hart. Also, in that issue's announcements listings, we misspelled the name of a Square One author; she is Martie Stevens, not Marie.