Archive for May, 2009

On a whim, this morning I checked to see how many of our 1,800 audiobooks had never been downloaded. I expected that this number would probably be into the hundreds. Well, I was wrong. In just the first 6 days since launch all but 58 books have been downloaded. Or, put another way 97% of titles have been read by at least one person.

I was at first hesitant to give details about which these were because that would likely skew the experiment a bit, but I couldn’t help but sharing how interesting a collection this list comprised.

• Bible (WEB) NT 20: James
• Bible (YLT) 24: Jeremiah
• Bible (YLT) 25: Lamentations
• Bible (YLT) 34-37: Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah and Haggai
• Byways Around San Francisco Bay
• Child-life in Art
• Christmas Poetry and Hymn Collection
• Chronicles of Canada Volume 05 – Seigneurs of Old Canada : A Chronicle of New World Feudalism, The
• Chronicles of Canada Volume 09 – The Acadian Exiles : A Chronicle of the Land of Evangeline
• Chronicles of Canada Volume 12 – The Father of British Canada; A Chronicle of Carelton
• Chronicles of Canada Volume 15 – The War Chief of the Ottawas : A chronicle of the Pontiac war
• Custom of the Country, The
• Dialogue Between a Methodist and a Churchman
• Drums of Jeopardy, The
• Familiar Letters on Chemistry
• Few Figs from Thistles, A
• George Bernard Shaw
• Grandma Janice’s Poems and Stories
• History of England from the Accession of James II – (Volume 2, Chapter 08)
• History of England from the Accession of James II – (Volume 2, Chapter 10)
• History of England from the Accession of James II – (Volume 3, Chapter 13)
• History of Henry Esmond, Esq., A Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Queen Anne, The
• Hollow Needle, The: Further Adventures of Arsène Lupin
• In the Desert
• King in Yellow (part 2), The
• Little Lame Prince, The
• Michael O’Halloran
• Moths of the Limberlost
• My Prime of Youth is but a Frost of Cares
• Peterkin Papers, The (version 2)
• Plan and Preface to a Dictionary of English
• Principles of Economics, The Appendices
• Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood
• Road Builders, The
• Sekar Karya
• Selected Poems of John Clare, Volume 2
• She and Allan
• Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52, The
• Short Nonfiction Collection Vol. 003
• Short Nonfiction Collection Vol. 007
• Short Nonfiction Collection Vol. 009
• Short Poetry Collection 005
• Short Poetry Collection 012
• Short Poetry Collection 016
• Short Poetry Collection 017
• Short Poetry Collection 020
• Short Poetry Collection 028
• Short Poetry Collection 033
• Short Poetry Collection 036
• Short Poetry Collection 039
• Short Poetry Collection 057
• Short Poetry Collection 063
• Sister Rosa: A Ballad
• Soup of Alphabets, Volume 003
• Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, The – Version 2
• Venus Transiens
• Western United States, The
• What Diantha Did

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Update: (6/22/2009) There are no longer any lonely books in the Audiobooks library. Everyone has been listened to at least once.

We have been blessed with some really kind reviews for our apps. I wanted to point out a few for your reference.

First, we got mentioned on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tuesday. [link]

Now, we just got word that our premium apps were featured on TapCritic. [link]

Check it out, if you want some unbiased thoughts about our applications.

As a follow-up to our post about why we made Audiobooks free. Here is a brief overview of how we keep it free.

When dealing with the transmission of such large amounts of audio content there are significant costs involved. We host a mirror of the LibriVox repository. Both to not place an undue burden on them and also to take responsibility for uptime and availability. In the first 72 hours after launch we have served up over 1 Terabyte of content and downloads are growing at a delightful rate. This bandwidth is relatively cheap but by no means free. In addition to the physical costs associated with running the App there are also the costs of our time and energy in creating and maintaining it.

To finance this effort we are selling Boutique Advertising within the main player. Basically, we sell 25 advertising slots each month. These ads are shown whenever you listen to a book. We preferred this approach to the typical mass media advertising networks because it gives us a far greater degree of control over what we advertise (no spam/scams here) and also provides a much more reliable source of revenue. To learn more about advertising with us please check out our Advertising Page.

I have been asked why we decided to make Audiobooks free, rather than charging even $0.99 for it. Especially, since we also market so many other public domain titles as paid premium apps and Audiobooks is arguably many times more valuable than any of these. I thought our view on this might interest a lot of people — so here it is.

First, there is the philosophical part of it. The Librivox Project is awesome. We love and appreciate that so many people take the time to record these treasures of literature for the world to enjoy. When these readers put in the effort to make a recording they are doing so with the goal and intention of spreading their content as widely and freely as possible. We wanted to honor that by providing a venue for their work to be disseminated widely within the iPhone community without hindrance. Especially, since it is such an apt medium for the platform.

Secondly, we put a lot of time and effort in our premium titles. We trim and edit the audio to remove any distractions. We format and synchronize the words for the book to play along side the narration. Also, we are very selective in which readers we choose to ensure that our customers are getting an excellent experience. There is no way, logistically, that we could put that amount of time and attention into the content of 1,800 titles. There are some great titles…and some not so great ones. We felt that by making it free, we aren’t setting up pretensions that customers are getting access to 1,800 premium titles.

Finally, we just like the exposure that a free app gets. In its first couple of days Audiobooks has already surpassed by a large margin our total downloads for all the other premium titles combined. We are currently the #2 app in the Books store and that visibility can only do good things for a small, independent operation like ours. We have a lot of other apps and ideas up our sleeves for the months ahead. Many of which will be best executed if we can show ourselves as a leader in the field of iPhone publishing.