Our history

While jogging around Riverside Park in Manhattan with a cassette player, Don Katz has a vision for a better way to listen to books while on the go: downloadable digital files.

Audible debuts the world’s first commercially available portable digital audio player. The first audiobook downloaded: Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus.

Audible introduces a membership model, giving customers access to our catalog for a flat monthly fee.

Audible launches a downloadable weekly audio program with Robin Williams years before the word “podcast” is coined. The Audible Otis portable audio player is introduced.

Audible Germany launches with a catalog of 250 German audiobooks – the first step in our mission to serve customers globally.

A key element of Audible’s culture is defined by our moving our world headquarters to Newark and being an active player in the city’s turnaround.

Leveraging Amazon’s reach and technological innovations has helped millions of readers discover the joy of listening. Audible is also awarded our first Audiobook of the Year Audie Award for The Chopin Manuscript.

Audible’s self-publishing marketplace ACX launches, helping connect authors, agents, and publishers with narrators, engineers, recording studios, and producers to create new audiobooks.

Audible introduces Whispersync for Voice (now Read & Listen), enabling book lovers to switch seamlessly between reading and listening without losing their place. Also, Immersion Reading, which enables people to read and listen to a book simultaneously with real-time highlighting of the text so they can be fully immersed in the experience.

Audible Studios wins a Grammy Award for Janis Ian’s autobiography, Society's Child.

Bringing Rooftop Media into the Audible family expands our offerings of comedy series and specials.

We mark our 20th anniversary with the introduction of our People Principles, which celebrate who we are and where we’ve been, and guide how we work together.

The campaign brought Audible’s bold brand promise vibrantly to life for customers across countries and audience touchpoints, proving that “there’s more to imagine when you listen.”

Working with publishers and creators, we launched end-to-end AI-assisted production technology, including AI narration and translation capabilities, to help bring the millions of books not yet available in audio to life. We also used AI to improve the search and discovery experience, better connecting listeners with their perfect title.