The iPod was still two years away, so Audible built its own player. The little device carried books, magazines, and radio programs that customers downloaded from the web, by the title or by subscription. When the New Jersey company went public in July 1999, most audiobooks still lived on cassettes and CDs. Home internet ran over dial-up modems. Audible was selling a habit that the hardware had yet to catch up with.

A Library for the Ear

Don Katz, a journalist and author, founded Audible in New Jersey in 1995. His bet was that spoken word belonged on the internet, off the plastic of tapes and discs. The company signed rights to books and periodicals and recorded much of its own catalog. Listeners would pay by the title or by subscription and play a book whenever they liked. In 1997 Audible shipped the Audible Mobile Player, a clumsy device fed by slow downloads.

Rescued by iTunes

Audible priced its offering at $9 a share in July 1999. The years after were hard. When the dot-com bubble burst, the stock fell far below its offer price. Then, in 2003, Audible signed a deal to supply audiobooks to Apple's iTunes Store. At last the company had the device it had always needed. Amazon bought Audible in 2008 for about $300 million, and Audible became the default place to buy an audiobook.

Cover: Angel Playing a Lute, Jacopo Confortini. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a lute player (music for the ear).