In an interview with Fast Company, Audible CEO Donald Katz discusses the publishing industry’s history of slow technological acceptance:
Publishing is an industry pursuing a noble cultural calling. But publishing has always had an ambivalent relationship to technology-driven change. In fact, the music publishing business spent a whole lot of time trying to kill off the phonograph. The publishing industry fought off the
paperback and was skeptical of the book club — which was
effectively a technology-driven invention that used the new
science of direct marketing and the mail to change the
business. Now there are innovations like Amazon and Audible [Note: Amazon acquired Audible in January ’08]Effectively, from my perspective, these disruptions — along
with Superstores — changed a relatively aristocratic product
into a mass market product. A lot of these disruptions have
allowed increasingly middle class and lower middle class
people to have access to books, which were traditionally for
rich people.