Simply Audiobooks

» see simplyaudiobooks.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Mail-order rental was a format, not just a business model, and it needed a particular kind of country to work: cheap reliable post, and a population comfortable sending a package back. North America had both in 2003, so Simply Audiobooks started in Burlington, Ontario and sent audiobooks on compact disc to anybody who paid monthly. Unlimited rentals with free delivery to the door, and no late fees ever. A Canadian company whose customers were mostly American, with distribution out of Buffalo and Las Vegas.

If that sounds like Netflix with a different payload, it was, deliberately. The whole early-2000s rent-by-mail wave copied the same arithmetic: a flat monthly fee, and physical media moving in prepaid envelopes while the subscriber paid for the privilege of not visiting a shop.

The twist with audiobooks is that the discs were awful objects for the job. An unabridged novel is eight to fourteen CDs, you swap them in the car, and losing disc nine means losing the book. Simply Audiobooks sent them anyway, for years, and kept layering formats on top as they arrived. Downloads came in 2005 as DRM-locked Windows Media files that needed Windows Media Player 10 or 11. In 2006 it opened online sales of discs and cassettes and bought what it described as the largest audiobook store in North America, in downtown Toronto. DRM-free MP3s followed in 2008, playable on an iPod or a Zune or anything else.

~ the dossier ~

~ the spin-off that outgrew it ~

On 24 January 2012 the company launched Audiobooks.com, and the press understood it immediately: Mashable's headline called it a Spotify for books. There was no app to install at first. You clicked a link and the book streamed in the browser, out of cloud storage, with a sync feature the company called cloudmark that remembered your place when you moved from a laptop to a phone. The catalog was around 11,000 titles that February, licensed from publishers including Blackstone Audio and HarperCollins. Native iOS and Android apps came mid-year.

That product is the one that mattered. RBmedia acquired Audiobooks.com on 11 April 2017, and it is still trading today as a real competitor to Audible. The company that built it had by then become the less interesting half of itself.

~ the long tail of the disc business ~

The strange part is how long the parent kept going. You would expect the CD-by-mail service to have been retired somewhere around 2013, when audiobook streaming became ordinary. It was not. The archive shows simplyaudiobooks.com serving a working storefront with the title "Rent Audio Books on CD. Unlimited. Free trial" as late as 2 March 2021, which means the pandemic year opened with a company still filling envelopes with discs.

Then it stops. From 15 April 2021 the address redirects to audiobooks.com, and the Canadian domain does the same. Both brands pointed at the child, which by then was owned by somebody else entirely. The grave is filed at the last day the store answered for itself, with the redirect as the second date, because no announcement exists.

~ why none of this reached me ~

Rent-by-mail never happened in Turkey. Not for DVDs and not for audiobooks, and not because nobody thought of it. The rental economy here was a shop on your street with a shelf and a deposit, and the physical-media habit went from that shelf straight to downloading, skipping the envelope stage completely. Every grave on this site in the mail-order rental family is one I can only read about, including the ones that lasted into the 2020s. Audiobooks themselves also arrived late in Turkish, which is a separate kind of absence: I was 19 when this company started, and the Turkish-language catalog such a service needs did not meaningfully exist yet.

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