Amazon Buys Audio-Book E-tailer Audible

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Feb 1st 2008 at 5:21PM

For the few of you out there lucky (crazy) enough to have gotten your hands on the Amazon Kindle e-book reader, one feature may have perplexed you -- the headphone jack. Headphones would be pretty useless on a device that can't play back audio. But we expect an update soon to unlock that feature as Amazon has just snatched up the web's biggest audio-book retailer, Audible.

Amazon sells everything else under the sun, so getting in on the audio-book market only makes sense. It's unclear how the Amazon purchase will affect Apple's deal with Audible for content access, or even who would pay $399 for an e-book reader only to listen to audio-books on it. That's what your iPod is for.

If you don't know what a Kindle is, see the gallery below.

Gallery: Amazon Kindle, Up Close

From BetaNews

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Filed under: Audio/Video, Computers, Downloads

Tags: amazon, audible, audio book, audio-book, AudioBook, business, e book, e-book, EBook, kindle

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