There's a company that I'm really into right now, and that company is Audible. I just made a purchase on their website, whereupon they got $14 off my AmEx and I downloaded 122MB of data from their servers. The whole experience was so wonderfully painless that I'm almost positive this is pretty damn close to what the future is like. At least for audio books. With a four hour drive on tomorrow's agenda, and an equal number of hours scheduled for Friday's return, I hope you can understand how happy I am to have purchased and successfully burned an audio version of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. Factoring in all the data security and ready-for-mobileness that the Audible software (screenshot) has been praised for, I don't think the process could have been much easier: I picked out a book I wanted to hear during my drive, put in my credit card number, and then my CD-ROM pops open asking for a blank CD (1 of 8). Their stock (ADBL.OB) is priced at $.51, which gives Audible a market value of around $16 million. Any takers? If I had a couple of tequillas in me and could remember my eTrade password.... Downside: Only $2 million in cash left, and even with 229,000 customers at $14.95/month, they still lost $765,000 last quarter.  ¶ Permalink 5/14/2003 02:33:00 AM