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Amazon Adds Audiobooks and Podcasts To Prime Membership (fortune.com)
If you're one of the 63 million Amazon Prime members out there, you may be happy to hear that Amazon will now grant you unlimited access to podcasts and audiobooks from Audible. Fortune reports: With Tuesday's news, Prime members will now be able to stream a rotating selection of more than 50 audiobooks. Prime members will also have free access to Amazon's newly launched on-demand audio service from Audible Channels, which provides ad-free podcasts and other audio content. Audible released the service in July, and is charging non-Prime members $4.95 each month to access the selection of podcasts. In addition to podcasts, Channels also includes access to audio versions of articles from major publications, comedy shows, short fiction, and more. Fingers crossed they have some engaging technology books in their rotating selection...
A major discovery for those unfamiliar with search engines and RSS readers.
In what way is a "rotating selection of 50 audiobooks" unlimited? Not only are Prime members limited to the 50 titles Amazon puts in rotation, they're limited in how much time they have to read the books! Limits, limits, everywhere! As with their "free" Prime movies, Amazon manages to make another utterly useless "free" offering -- that costs $99/year.
That's a pretty limited subset of the thousands of books at Audible.
So it's more of a teaser (that happens to rotate every month). Just like Prime Video - where they make it difficult for you to search for free video, and try to sell you to buy the non-free Amazon video.
Cross-promotion within the company's product suites? Wake me up when they get serious.
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I wish you (and Amazon) would stop calling it free. It's not free, it's flat-rate. That rate is $99/year, equal to the price of quite a few orders of 2-day shipping.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.