Audible.com has the new Stephen Colbert book 4 days before the dead-tree edition is released. I was alerted to this fact via email earlier today from Audible.com (where I am a member) and immediately planned to buy it.
Awesome! Cool! I love Audible.com and I love Stephen so I’m sure that I’ll want to…. Oh… wait…
First of all, $17.49? That’s absurd. The dead-tree version is $16.19 at Amazon. You don’t need to print it, you don’t need to ship it, you don’t need to warehouse it, so why is the audiobook more expensive than the dead-tree version? (It’s also my considered opinion that anyone who buys a dead-tree version of a book ought to get the audio version, if it exists, for free. I’m not talking about CDs, I’m only talking about a downloadable version. Why not? You’ve already paid for the book, right? Why should you have to pay for it again to listen to it?)
Plus, the audio book is abridged. It comes in at 3 hours 33 minutes.
Stephen King, in On Writing, said that he didn’t “get” why people would abridge books. If you could cut stuff out, why did you leave it in?
Plus, I always want to know “So what did they leave out? Was it just some charts and graphs, or are there whole sections of the book that I’m going to miss now?”
(See, now if they gave away copies of the audio version when you bought the dead-tree version, I could compare the two and find out for myself.)
Even at the “Members Only” price of $12.24, it’s too much for a shortened version. Maybe I’ll get the dead-tree version. Maybe not.
sigh