With rich content, ‘India is ready for Audible’

Varun Aggarwal

Forum Gandhi

Well, first of all, I’m lucky to be me at this point because I had two careers, I got to take ideas and turn them into reality. And when I was the kind of reporter and writer. So, I had the assignment to write my fourth book about digital media technology and how it would change culture. I never wrote that book, but Audible is what came out of that experience. I was very close to Steve Jobs. And the whole story of Audible, we were very impacted by a phone call I received in 2001, where Jobs told me that he admired our technology and to this day, nobody I’ve ever known has ever heard Steve Jobs admire anyone’s technology outside of Apple.

We invented not just the first digital audio player, but we invented the way of taking a file and maintaining state which was complicated physics at that time and we also invented the first way of securing the intellectual property which was later called Digital Rights Management (DRM).

It’s harder for us sometimes to come into a new country, because there isn’t just a lot of recorded audio to just put onto our platform. The capital intensity to bring into a new country, particularly to do it right. We have a multi-year plan to go into local languages it’s usually a big investment, and we’re willing to make it right now. We do have thousands of Indian customers who pay the US rates and so we were able to study their patterns. So we’ve really wanted to study the best way to do.

I think it’s ready to accept Audible because it’s much more than audio-books. India has some of the best script writers, most creative comedians, most creative actors and performers. We will help them come together to figure out what the best possible programming is and if it comes from books, that’s great.

But if it doesn’t come from books that is also great, it’ll still have higher education value, information value and entertainment value.

Books were viable ways to transfer this performance art with the new technology into people’s ears and obviously Indian literature from both the book and the pre-book is very rich. However, there are more original scripts, original programmes, and multimedia programmes in the 1970s.

There used to be a strong radio theatre tradition here (in India) that became very popular again, even though most radio theories were popular 30 or 40 years earlier, and we will definitely capture that, too.

For one of our launch titles, Durjoy Datta has written and recorded something for Audible exclusively. Radhika Apte, Raajkumar Rao, and Kalki Koechlin have also lent their voices to one of our other launch titles. It’s based on literary work, but it is also dramatisation and production work to bring entertainment value to our listeners.

We will continue to invent and typically you’ll see new things coming out from us that help have the text and the audio. We’re consistently working on ways to help particularly developing readers.

You’ll see different ways to have the audio itself more interactive. We have an advanced technology team and we will keep inventing.

So we see lots of different ways to have the audio experience far more interactive and so exciting to continue to be an invention company and more than the content company.

We have 600 people just working on the technology.

We will do it and will announce it as we call it, on graduating.

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