why doesn't Amazon show any love to it's child Audible?

The picture to the left shows a book on Amazon that is not available as a Kindle download.

Amazon thoughtfully provides a link that allows us to send a message to the books publisher asking that it be made available as a Kindle e-book.

So why doesn't Amazon provide the same option to tell the publisher that we'd like the book as an audiobook?   

This is just one area where I remain completely confused and frustrated with how Amazon has (failed) to integrate Audible.

Back in 2008 when Amazon purchased Audible (for $300 million) I was hopeful that this would mean some major improvements on the Audible side. To date, these improvements have been slow in coming.

The situation:

• Do not have any integration of Audible and Amazon accounts.

• We can't put Audible books on our Amazon Wish List.

• The audible.com recommendation engine remains terrible compared to Amazon's.

• In fact, the whole Audible site is suffers greatly compared to Amazon.com.   It is slow, poorly designed to find new books, barely personalized, and basically difficult to navigate.

Amazon is missing a real opportunity to tap into a dedicated group of people who are big Amazon spenders and Audible subscribers.  We are passionate about our audio books and would be natural early adopters for e-books if Amazon found a way to bundle the services.  We would buy many more audio books if we could have an audiobook store on Amazon with all its recommendation, site design, navigation and community goodness.

And yes....we want a way to tell the publisher that we want an audio version!

Comments

[Ryan Erwin]

Absolutely second your comment here. I've been a big user of Audible for years. I've purchased well over 100 audiobooks from audible, and once the iSlate comes out, I would love to use the iSlate to purchase my favorite magazines (Economist, Atlantic, New Yorker) and tons of ebooks without so that you've always got everything you want to read, and no need to wait for shipping.

The Audible site is finally slowly getting better, but the Wish List, RSS feeds, Widgets all need to be improved. The Audible "recommendation engine" is simply a disaster.

Would be great if Amazon simply let you take an "audible book" view of the regular Amazon site... As Amazon's recommendations are extremely impressive.