Simply Audiobooks is a privately held

e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) refers to commercial activities including the electronic buying or selling products and services which are conducted on online platforms or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile co ...

company that offers

audiobook An audiobook (or a talking book) is a recording of a book or other work being read out loud. A reading of the complete text is described as "unabridged", while readings of shorter versions are abridgements. Spoken audio has been available in sch ...

s for rental, downloading, and sale. Their primary product line is a subscription-based rent-by-mail model for books on CD, similar to

Netflix Netflix is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service. The service primarily distributes original and acquired films and television shows from various genres, and it is available internationally in multiple lang ...

DVD-by-mail DVD-by-mail is a business model in which customers order DVDs and similar discs containing films, television shows, video games, and other media to rent, which are then delivery to the customer by mail. Generally, all interaction between the ren ...

model. Although a Canadian company, based in

Burlington, Ontario Burlington, officially the City of Burlington, is a city and List of municipalities in Ontario#Lower-tier municipalities, lower-tier municipality in Regional Municipality of Halton, Halton Region at the west end of Lake Ontario in Ontario, Can ...

, the majority of Simply Audiobooks' customers reside in the United States.

History

*2003: Simply Audiobooks launched with its core rental service, offering unlimited audiobook rentals in both the United States and Canada with free direct-to-door delivery and no due dates or late fees. *2005: Simply Audiobooks launched audiobooks via download, through low-cost monthly subscriptions and ''a la carte'' purchases. These downloads are DRM-protected WMA files which can be downloaded to any Windows computer with

Windows Media Player Windows Media Player (WMP, officially referred to as Windows Media Player Legacy to retronym, distinguish it from Windows Media Player (2022), the new Windows Media Player introduced with Windows 11) is the first media player (application soft ...

10 or 11 and are compatible with most

MP3 players A portable media player (PMP) or digital audio player (DAP) is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. Normally they refer to small, Electric battery, batter ...

. *2006: Simply Audiobooks launched the sale of audiobooks on CD and cassette online. They also purchased North America's largest audiobook store in downtown

Toronto Toronto ( , locally pronounced or ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, most populous city in Canada. It is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Ontario. With a p ...

, near the company's headquarters in Oakville, Canada. *2008: Simply Audiobooks began offering DRM-free MP3 downloads which can be downloaded to any computer (running

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

, Mac OS X, or Windows) and are compatible with any MP3 player (

iPod The iPod is a series of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices that were designed and marketed by Apple Inc. from 2001 to 2022. The iPod Classic#1st generation, first version was released on November 10, 2001, about mon ...

, Zansa,

Zen Zen (; from Chinese: ''Chán''; in Korean: ''Sŏn'', and Vietnamese: ''Thiền'') is a Mahayana Buddhist tradition that developed in China during the Tang dynasty by blending Indian Mahayana Buddhism, particularly Yogacara and Madhyamaka phil ...

, or

Zune Zune was a brand of digital media products and services that was marketed by Microsoft from November 2006 until it was discontinued in June 2012. Zune consisted of a line of portable media players, a music subscription service known as Zune Music ...

) or

Smartphone A smartphone is a mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as multi ...

. *2013: From July 1–6, in honor of Independence Day, Staples.com offered three downloadable Simply Audiobooks for $0.01 each: ''Bill of Rights Audiobook - Download'', ''The Constitution & Historical Influences'', and ''Gettysburg Address & Emancipation Audiobook-Download'', which do not appear on the company's website and which lack such details as the items' narrators, producers, and release dates.

Audiobooks.com

On January 24, 2012, Simply Audiobooks launched Audiobooks.com, the first

cloud-based Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

service for audiobooks, allowing users to access audiobooks on Internet-enabled devices, such as PCs,

smart phones A smartphone is a mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as multi ...

, and

tablet computer A tablet computer, commonly shortened to tablet, is a mobile device, typically with a mobile operating system and touchscreen display processing circuitry, and a rechargeable battery in a single, thin and flat package. Tablets, being computers ...

s. The application allows users to listen to audiobooks by clicking on a link and

streaming Streaming media refers to multimedia delivered through a network for playback using a media player. Media is transferred in a ''stream'' of packets from a server to a client and is rendered in real-time; this contrasts with file downl ...

their book within the web browser itself, rather than downloading a dedicated application. The audiobooks are stored in

cloud storage Cloud storage is a model of computer data storage in which data, said to be on "the cloud", is stored remotely in logical pools and is accessible to users over a network, typically the Internet. The physical storage spans multiple servers (so ...

, which means users can listen to books at any time without downloading files and taking up space on their device. The service uses proprietary cloudmark synchronization technology that enables users to mark their place in an audiobook on one device and continue listening from the same spot when they switch to a different listening device, without needing a

browser plug-in A browser extension is a software module for customizing a web browser. Browsers typically allow users to install a variety of extensions, including user interface modifications, cookie management, ad blocking, and the custom scripting and styl ...

or special application. As of February 2012, the company's library currently contained more than 11,000 titles from such publishers as

Blackstone Audio Blackstone Audio is an independent audiobook publisher in the United States, offering over 25,000 audiobooks. The company is based in Ashland, Oregon, with five in-house recording studios. Blackstone distributes directly to consumers via their ...

HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is a British–American publishing company that is considered to be one of the "Big Five (publishers), Big Five" English-language publishers, along with Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group USA, Hachette, Macmi ...

, and

Simon & Schuster Simon & Schuster LLC (, ) is an American publishing house owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts since 2023. It was founded in New York City in 1924, by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. Along with Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group US ...

. Audiobooks.com is compatible with

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated as IE or MSIE) is a deprecation, retired series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were u ...

, and

Safari A safari (; originally ) is an overland journey to observe wildlife, wild animals, especially in East Africa. The so-called big five game, "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, African leopard, leopard, rhinoceros, African elephant, elep ...

. Supported devices include Android devices (Android 2.3 and above), Apple

iPads The iPad is a brand of tablet computers developed and marketed by Apple that run the company's mobile operating systems iOS and later iPadOS. The first-generation iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010. Since then, the iPad product lin ...

and

iPhones The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at M ...

(IOS4.0 or higher), and tablet devices using an

HTML 5 HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend ...

web application. The company is currently working on apps for

BlackBerry OS BlackBerry OS is a discontinued proprietary mobile operating system developed by Canadian company Research In Motion (now BlackBerry Limited) for its BlackBerry line of smartphone handheld devices. The operating system provides multitasking ...

and

Windows Mobile Windows Mobile is a discontinued mobile operating system developed by Microsoft for smartphones and personal digital assistants (PDA). Designed to be the portable equivalent of the Windows desktop OS in the emerging Mobile device, mobile/port ...

. The company released native iOS and Android apps in mid-2012. Audiobooks.com was acquired by

RBmedia RBMedia is an audiobook publishing company with sales globally. Headquartered in Landover, Maryland, it claims to be the largest audiobook publisher in the world. The company was founded in 2017 through the acquisition of independent audiobook co ...

on April 11, 2017 for an undisclosed amount.

Office locations

Simply Audiobooks' head office is located in Burlington, ON, Canada. They also have two distribution facilities in

Buffalo, New York Buffalo is a Administrative divisions of New York (state), city in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York and county seat of Erie County, New York, Erie County. It lies in Western New York at the eastern end of Lake Erie, at the head of ...

and

Las Vegas, Nevada Las Vegas, colloquially referred to as Vegas, is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Nevada and the county seat of Clark County. The Las Vegas Valley metropolitan area is the largest within the greater Mojave Desert, and second-l ...

References

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External links

www.simplyaudiobooks.com
US Site
www.simplyaudiobooks.ca
Canadian Site 2003 establishments in Ontario Online retailers of Canada Book rental Publishing companies established in 2003 Companies based in Oakville, Ontario 2017 mergers and acquisitions Canadian companies established in 2003

History

Audiobooks.com

Office locations

See also

References

External links