Audible Announces New "Modern Vanguard” Line of Audiobooks

Audible, Inc. today announced the launch of a new line of audiobooks, "Audible Modern Vanguard,” which will bring to unabridged audio landmark fiction and nonfiction works from the 20th century by leading literary innovators such as Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut, John Cheever, John Irving and Paul Auster. The inaugural list is composed of 34 works by 10 authors, including one Nobel Prize winner and three Pulitzer Prize winners, with forthcoming performances of books by Philip Roth, Lawrence Durrell, Richard Yates and many others.

The "Audible Modern Vanguard” collection will be presented online at audible.com by author and publisher James Atlas, the president of Atlas & Co., who has produced supplemental audio programs pairing each new audiobook with candid author interviews and discussion. Atlas talks to John Irving, Paul Auster and Bret Easton Ellis, and audible.com listeners will have a chance to hear Azar Nafisi discussing Saul Bellow; Russell Banks on William Kennedy; Gay Talese on Kurt Vonnegut; Larry Kramer talking about Randy Shilts’ groundbreaking history of AIDS, "And the Band Played On”; and Naomi Wolf assessing the radical impact of Betty Friedan’s classic, "The Feminine Mystique,” on American culture. Biographers Blake Bailey and Tracy Daugherty are also featured, talking to Atlas about the work of John Cheever and Donald Barthelme.

"I’m very proud to be a part of ‘Audible Modern Vanguard,’” said Atlas. "The experience of literature in the form of sophisticated audio performances has clearly moved into the cultural mainstream. I am consistently impressed by the number of serious readers who have become devotees of literate listening, and I hope Audible’s new program will help meet the demand of this growing audience.”

"Part of our mission at audible.com is to offer our listeners the largest and most complete selection of seminal fiction and nonfiction titles available as digital audio,” said Donald Katz, founder and CEO of audible.com. "And for some time we have been amazed—and our listeners frustrated – by the number of essential works of 20^th-century literature that remain unavailable as downloadable audiobooks. It’s gratifying to observe the rapidly rising appreciation of the literary integrity of audiobooks, a phenomenon clearly aided by the increasing number of gifted actors capable of interpreting important books as artistic performances. ‘Audible Modern Vanguard’ includes powerful, entertaining, often complex narrative interpretations of great literary works, finally available in audio.”

Narrators include four Audie winners, numerous Audie nominees, Earphone winners and nominees, as well as acclaimed actors Parker Posey and Pablo Schreiber.

Rights to all titles in the "Audible Modern Vanguard” list were acquired by Maria Olson, associate partner of content acquisition at Audible, who is continuing to work with key rights holders to bring important backlist titles to audio. For further information, please contact James Pearson, director of corporate communications, at jpearson@audible.com or 973-820-0474.

About Audible.com

Audible (www.audible.com), an Amazon.com, Inc. subsidiary, is a leading provider of premium digital spoken audio information and entertainment on the Internet. Content from Audible is downloaded and played back on personal computers, CDs, or AudibleReady computer-based and wireless mobile devices. Audible has over 60,000 audio programs from more than 800 content providers that include leading audiobook publishers, broadcasters, entertainers, magazine and newspaper publishers, and business information providers. Audible is the preeminent provider of spoken-word audio products for Apple’s iTunes Store. Audible, Audible.com, AudibleListener, AudibleReady and AudibleKids are trademarks of Audible, Inc. or its affiliates. Other product or service names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel; Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial.

Amazon Web Services provides Amazon’s developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon CloudFront.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and www.amazon.cn.

As used herein, "Amazon.com,” "we,” "our” and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.