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Audible.com is a company that has online audio versions of books that can be downloaded to an MP3 player. I’ve been a subscriber to Audible.com since early 2001 (5 year anniversary in a week). At the time I joined, I was commuting an hour each way, and listening to books really made the time go by (and made me a little more knowledgeable, I hope).

Last December I got a letter and a free set of earbuds from Audible. The letter was from the president, Don Katz, telling me that, while they appreciated my business and my loyalty, the fact was that Audible was losing money on all its early-adopter listeners. I get two books a month for a very low price. He said that Audible would continue to honor the legacy account, but asked me to upgrade to a new account which would be only one book plus an audio magazine subscription.

My thought at the time was “Yeah, right. How can you lose money when there’s no inventory but some bits and bytes, and bandwidth for downloads?”

Since then, I’ve downloaded an audio from Business 2.0 magazine, which is a very good article by Paul Keegan, about Don Katz and the long struggle he’s had keeping Audible.com viable. It gave me a lot of background info I never knew about Audible and how it came to be. One thing the article mentioned was that Audible pays royalties on every download. The letter never mentioned that; I had just assumed, for some reason, that it was a lump sum deal.

Here’s a link to the print version of the article about Audible. And a link to Business 2.0’s blog, which is where I found out about the article.

Then today I upgraded to the latest version of the Audible manager, which manages all my audio books. It also fixed a problem I’ve been having with my legacy audio player, the Otis.

I’m much happier with Audible than I’ve been in a while, and feeling kindly towards the company. I’m tempted to upgrade, but not quite ready to commit.

But here’s the thing: why did I have to find out about the interview, and about the software upgrade, on my own? Well, it turns out that I never subscribed to their newsletter. But who needs more email? I’m drowning already.

If they had a blog, they could have posted a link to the Business 2.0 article and audio, and been giving me info about how they operate. They could have told me about the new, improved Audible manager and all the cool things it does. I could have subscribed via RSS and maybe found out about these things ahead of time.

It would have given me a better relationship with the company, helping me understand it, instead of having it seem an invisible entity, hiding behind a weird green interface. It would have made Audible more of a “them” instead of an “it.”

Audible does have a few RSS feeds. But they’re not what I want — there are no feeds by subject, just a dump of all the new content (an impressive amount, to be sure) that Audible is adding to their library.

If they have a newsletter, they have the content for a blog. I can’t even find archives of the newsletter online! They have all this content lost to the world — no Google juice, no nothing. That content could be working for them, every day.

Wake up, Audible! Your audience is out here, waiting for you.