I remember when audiobooks from the library were literally books on tape. You'd get a giant binder with like 20 cassettes tapes in it. I think the biggers one were also split up, so you could checkout, say, 10 hours worth at a time.

We still have a box of a lot of books on tape we found in a garage sale around here. Had to get a tape player for the kids to listen to them, as they were the kind where they had the books with them, too. Was a ton of fun, if a touch annoying to deal with rewinding the tape and such.

We also still have more than a few books on CD. We don't get as many as we used to, ironically, since it is far more convenient to use audible. Nice to shift from car to bedroom for stories.

I've been curious on why more "music players" weren't better at audio books. I'm guessing the ability to save mid track is just not nearly as big of a deal for most music applications?

Exactly. You can still find a few devices that did it (often out of Japan, especially minidisk players, for example), but most had no permanent memory or only a few bytes for radio stations, and of course you can't write to a CD.

Many car CD-players handled it just fine.

Every car stereo I've had for at least the past decade automatically saves the position when you turn the car off.

My understanding is that Amazon runs imprints, like Audible Originals [1], that basically act like a publisher. I.e., they buy the rights, produce the audio, pay the voice actor, and the author gets some royalty (presumably smaller than 40%).

But my understanding is that the large publishers mostly do this themselves (and therefore have to pay the voice actor out of the 40% cut they get). Similarly, independent authors won't get access to this level of service; in some cases they're literally reading the book themselves, but they still only get the 40% cut (and that's with exclusivity).

The reason why audiobooks are cheaper is due to the subscription model. That's the chief innovation that Amazon pioneered with Audible. Now, their clout certainly also had something to do with it, and the burgeoning Kindle ecosystem. But the issue of price is really a matter of subscriptions being stickier and keeping customers in the ecosystem longer, making it possible to make aggregate more money. It's the same business model as Netflix, Dropbox, Adobe CC, etc.

[1]: https://www.audible.com/ep/audible-originals

I'd only rephrase your later paragraph to say that the reason it is cheaper is because Audible chased their marginal cost advantage of copies and drove for cheaper sales. Publishers have know of subscription models forever, such that they could have done this years ago. They didn't, because they chased the marginal costs of printing books so that that was their advantage.

That is, the new advances in audio recording and digital distribution led to a vastly superior marginal cost environment that didn't exist back in the 80s/90s. Publishers decided not to lean in on that, and by the time Audible had demonstrated that it was a viable market, it was too late for them to squeeze them on license costs.

I admit this sounds almost conspiratorial, but they literally colluded to try and force higher prices on ebooks. Such that I don't find this that beyond the pale.