Audible.com Web Site is Lousy (To Be Polite)

My wife was surprised this week when I told her Audible.com has been charging her $14.95 every month for almost a year. She checked into it and realized she had signed up for a monthly subscription without even know it. That's a problem right there. Before closing the account, she wanted to redeem six book credits her account had accumulated. We decided to divide them evenly.

When it was my turn to select books, I was expecting an experience similar to Amazon.com. First of all, the Audible.com web site is very slow. Not snappy like Amazon.com, or any other website I use by choice for that matter. Seconds lagged each time I clicked a link.

Secondly, the category navigation is not very intuitive.

Thirdly, it looks like the site is quite different depending on if you are signed in or not. The site is more appealing when they are trying to lure you into registration, and frankly it's faster too. Tolerably fast. Audible.com offers fewer categories, perhaps to remove clutter and reduce load times.

Once you log in, its the slow site. Clicking on "Science Fiction & Fantasy" now and you can feel the delay before the page loads. You get to a page that displays, among other sub-categories for fantasy etc:

# Sci-Fi: Classic (217)
# Sci-Fi: Contemporary (555)

That is not a great number of titles. It gets more frustrating after clicking around twenty pages or so, the amount it took me to figure out "Contemporary" means anything since 1980. There is no way to browse with multiple filters, for example all "contemporary" sci-fi that was also on the New York Times best sellers list. The closest thing Audible.com offers is all 555 titles, sorted by how often they are sold on Audible.com.

I clicked on that link, got frustrated at how long the page was taking to load and was able to type "I'm composing this" before the page loaded.

Suffice it to say, Audible.com: now that Amazon.com has entered the audio book market place, you web site needs a huge overhaul to be competitive:

1) Speed. The competition is a click away.
2) Breadth of content: I understand sci-fi may be your weak area, but if you don't have what I want for all my audio book needs, I'll go elsewhere.
3) Navigation. Browsing a book store is easy and pleasurable. You're website needs to be even easier. Let me go to sci-fi, and then narrow down to New York Times best sellers. Then let me sort by newest first. By letting me narrow in, and showing me what path I am on, you would let me feel like I am getting closer to the perfect purchase. Otherwise I'm lost in the woods, and leave.

"The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson must really hate glass. In "Snow Crash" (yeah, I know book titles are supposed to be underlined, not quoted like an article, but Blogger doesn't allow for underline because now underline = link).... (Begin again:) In "Snow Crash" he has skateboards equipped with sonic glass-destruction blasts. And in "The Diamond Age" nano-extruded diamond has replaced glass because its cheaper and stronger. He highlights the quaint distortion of perspective through glass. Ok, Neal, we get it: glass is bad. (I'll need to re-read Cryptonomicon to see if it contains glass bashing.)

This isn't a review, just some of my thoughts after reading the book. I loved the book and will continue to read everything Neal Stephenson writes. Without going through his trash, I mean.

In "The Diamond Age" Neal explores the possibilities of nanotechnology. My brain is stuck on Neal's (can I call you Neal? Thanks.) posit that things built in a vacuum can be hollow, thereby contain a vacuum, yet be strong enough to maintain integrity when exposed to normal atmospheric pressure, and thus are lighter than air. I love the premise. Its elegantly simple but my brain rejects it. I want to see if it really works. I don't get to; thats why its called fiction.

Diamond is pure carbon, simple. But doesn't it take enormous pressure to get carbon to align itself in a crystal lattice? Neal, I wanted you to explain where all that energy comes from. Just a paragraph or two lay that piece out, please. Energy is everything, really. Once energy is solved, all physical things like starvation go away.

I enjoyed the node logic of the drummers. It fits my world-view. All are nodes, all have a value. The whole exists as nodes add and delete. The equation never completes.