Amazon has acquired Michigan audiobook publisher Brilliance who have a catalogue of over 1,000 audio titles and releases 20 to 40 new titles a month.
Amazon's subsidiary CustomFlix will now support both standard CD and mp3-CD audiobook formats in its "disc on demand" service which produces audio titles on CD on demand. The question it raises is when this model will flip into audio downloads. Was Brilliance bought for it content and list? Does this now make Amazon a publisher and fill in the last space in the value chain?
Reality is that it is probably now time that Amazon wants to stop referring audio customer to Audible and the move is one more part of the jigsaw before Bezos takes on Steve Jobs’s iWorld.
