Archive for September, 2009

We’re Back!

Posted by David in Book News on September 11th, 2009

We are back in action. After a couple of months of hanging in limbo, we are back to creating awesome audiobook apps for the iPhone. We have two major announcements to make.

Firstly, we are very pleased to announce that download is back in Audiobooks. We have been allowed to reintroduce downloading of audiobook content for offline playback as a paid app. This is called Audiobooks (Download Edition) and is available now.

App_Store_Badge_EN

We have also been working on a LOT of updates to these apps, which will be coming online over the coming weeks. These include all the great feedback you have been sending us for what you want your audiobook experience to be like. If you have an idea and haven’t let us know please email us at info@travelingclassics.com.

We really appreciate all your patience with us as we strive to deliver the best possible audiobook experience on the iPhone or iPod Touch!

Here is a free copy for the first person to use this promo code: LRNP77TKHX77 .

Secondly, we are really excited to start offering premium audiobooks in the App Store. Our first partner in this is Christian Audio. The premier publisher of christian audiobook content. We have begun a partnership that will provide their professionally recorded titles as individual apps. For more information about these checkout Christian Audio

ChristianAudio

Our first titles are:

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Update – not dead but waiting.

Posted by David in Uncategorized on September 4th, 2009

As you may have noticed things have been a bit quiet here at the Traveling Classics desk. Not because of lack of activity, but because of lack of progress. It appears that all audiobook related apps are currently on hold with Apple. So while we have created a variety of exciting new apps (including some great new professionally recorded audiobooks), they are stuck in limbo for now. We have assurances that this will be sorted out soon, but until then I wanted to give a few updates on the phenomenal success of audiobooks. Even after its utility was greatly diminished by the whole streaming fiasco (link) it still is growing by leaps and bounds.

Here is a graph of daily usage of Audiobooks:
Screen shot 2009-09-04 at 9.49.22 AM

As you can see it is growing quite nicely each day and interestingly shows an oscillation based on the day of the week (Wednesdays being the most popular day).

Here is a graph of total users of Audiobooks:
Screen shot 2009-09-04 at 9.50.21 AM

So while the number of new users per day has shrunk a lot since we had to use streaming it has stabilized at a very consistent daily growth.

Last but not least to-date Audiobooks has been used to listen to 3,937,077 books. All that in about 3 months. It is hard to judge exactly, but accordingly to the Association of American Publishers around $9.5 million worth of audiobooks are sold each month. So at an average price of $10 a book, we are actually doing better than the entire audiobook market of the USA. Not bad, eh?

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