Rob Cannon

 http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=ADBL&script=412&layout=-6&item_id=617618

If you are a commuter, you need to check out Audible.  It is a great way to get downloadable audio books that you can play through most MP3 players.  It’s a great way to pass the driving hours.  The best deal is the premium plan where you get two books a month for a fixed price.  The link above is a new bundling deal with Sprint where you will be able to play these books through your SmartPhone.  I would love to combine my book reader (right now the old Audible Otis) with my SmartPhone, but I can’t imagine how short the battery life would be!

One great feature of Audible is that once you purchase a book, you can download it again whenever you want.  They keep track of the books that you own.  It’s the missing feature that keeps me from checking out the various music download services.  Those downloaded songs just don’t seem permanent to me.  Either your hard drive crashes and you loose all of your purchased music or you can never find what you want on all of those backup CD’s shoved in a drawer somewhere (plus you have to manage those backups). 

It would be a great value-added feature for a download service to promise eternal ownership of the song that you purchase from them and you don’t have to worry about the backup.  Plus, it would pretty much kill any possibility of customer churn as a customer would have a big incentive to stay with one download service.