Donald Katz is founder, CEO, and Chairman of the Board of Audible, Inc., the Internet's premier audio information and entertainment service. Founded in 1995 and based in Newark, NJ, Audible developed audible.com, the popular ecommerce web destination and the first system for distributing audio via the Internet for playback at or away from the PC. The Company also commercialized the first portable digital audio player in 1997. Audible (ADBL) is listed on the NASDAQ exchange and has been consistently included in the Deloitte & Touche Fast 50 and Fast 500 listings. In 2006, Audible was once again included at the top of the Fast 50 and Fast 500 lists for attaining a 1,218% five year growth rate.
Katz, winner of the 2004 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for New Jersey, was a successful author and journalist for twenty years before founding Audible. He is the author of Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears, winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction; and Just Do It: The Nike Spirit in the Corporate World. Katz served as a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, Esquire, Outside, Sports Illustrated, Men's Journal, and Worth, and his writing won or was nominated for several National Magazine Awards. A two-volume collection of Katz's award-winning magazine stories, King of the Ferret Leggers and Other True Stories and Valley of the Fallen and Other Places was published in 2001.
Donald Katz graduated from New York University's honors program in English in 1974. He also attended The University of Chicago as well as The London School of Economics, from which he holds an MSc Economics.
So I really sought out people to teach me what I didn't know. On the technology front, the idea for Audible, the idea that you could compress the spoken word, send it through these new networks and then our idea that you had to be able to capture at the other end and liberate it so you could take i...(Full transcript available to logged in subscribers.).
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