Archive for category Uncategorized

We are happy to announce the first of a series of updates to Audiobooks and Audiobooks Lite. Now that we have AudioBookShelf out the door we turned our attention back to Audiobooks. In addition to a variety of tweaks and bug fixes, we are responding to the overwhelming number of requests and adding a Sleep Timer. This is available as a free update to everyone already using either apps.

Check it out in the App Store.

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:

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:

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?

We have just hit our 100,000th download. It took around 13 days to do. In that time we have helped users to download and enjoy just over 375,000 books.

Thank you all for your support, we are truly amazed.

I was checking the rank of Audiobooks today and found a rather amusing sight.

I guess that I am glad that we are doing better than Pee Monkey Toilet Trainer, but that can’t feel good for Amazon.

Looking for that perfect book to read over the weekend. Here are the download stats for the top 10 books. These are the total downloads for the first 6 days the app has been available.

• Dracula – 8,008
• Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The – 5,330
• Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The – 5,165
• Art of War, The – 4,911
• Pride and Prejudice – 4,585
• How to Speak and Write Correctly – 4,075
• 9/11 Commission Report, The – 3,848
• Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases – 3,559
• Count of Monte Cristo, The – 3,383
• Grimms’ Fairy Tales – 3,008