Update – not dead but waiting.


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?

  1. #1 by Carroll at September 6th, 2009

    I downloaded Gulliver’s Travels on Wednesday and then lost all of my applications on Thursday. Is it possible to get Gulliver’s Travels back?

  2. #2 by Fr. Ignatius at September 9th, 2009

    I am so glad that you are back, and by the looks of those charts, doing well.

    I downloaded the new Audiobooks Download version. Thanks for your hard work (it is definitely worth $1).

    Keep up the good work.

    I will try to download books on days other than Wednesday, hopefully the chart will even out that way.

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