[HotHotLava]

> But it’s Audible. What choice is there?

I mean, at $11 a year it doesn't sound like Audible is a critical part of your income, so why not create a gumroad account and sell directly from the authors and/or narrators website? It sounds like you could even offer a heavily discounted price and still come out ahead.

If enough producers come together this way you could even create some producer's co-op that can put up a basic webshop and account system.

[INTPenis]

Yeah the funny thing is that AWS, GCP, Azure and so on provide all the infrastructure to cheaply distribute audiobooks on your own.

All we need now is for someone to sit down and write an open source tool for it.

I'm a dreamer but I see a world where audiobook creators can create an account on a privately hosted instance, sort of like bookwyrm but with payment features, promote their work using ActivityPub in a federated way, and distribute the media p2p using something like peertube.

And consumers can hear the media in any of a number of clients.

[wccrawford]

It's not just distribution, but also the player. I tried other players in the past and had problems with them. When Audible's just worked and was reliable, I stuck with it. I can't be alone in that thinking.

Perhaps there are better players now, but if you're going to distribute the audio book on your own store, I think you need to be ready to recommend a good player for each OS your customer might be on. And it had better actually be a good player, or people will be upset with you, too.