Mr. Katz will also explain Audible's vision for distribution of free, pay-per download and paid subscription only access to audio versions of books, public radio, newspaper, magazines and many other forms of audio content online. Katz also talks about how podcasting is in the midst of transforming Audible.com into a software tools company that enables Audible listeners and outside podcasters to become audio content creators and distributors. Katz also discusses expanding Audibles' distribution into the podcasting platform and will also offer its downloadable programs to expanded storage mobile wireless cellular and data phones.
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Donald Katz is founder, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Audible, Inc., the Internet’s
premier audio information and entertainment service. Audible, founded in 1995
and based in Wayne, NJ, developed the first copyright-secure system for
distributing audio via the Internet for playback at or away from the PC, and the
Company commercialized the first digital audio player in 1997. From it’s Web
site – www.audible.com –
and via Audible’s key distribution partners, Amazon.com and the Apple iTunes
Music Store, Audible serves busy listeners who seek convenient access to the
best of audio information, entertainment, and education. Audible’s customers
around the world download and listen to audiobooks, daily audio digests of
leading newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times,
weekly audio digests of Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Scientific American,
and others, as well as to time-shifted public radio programs such as All Things
Considered, Car Talk, and Marketplace, and original spoken word content such as
Robin Williams. Audible (ADBL) is a public company that trades on the Nasdaq
Stock Exchange.
Donald Katz won the 2004 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for New
Jersey. He has also led Audible to top-10 rankings in the Deloitte & Touche Fast
50 competition for 2002, 2003, and 2004. He was also honored in 1999 as
Entrepreneur of the Year by Silicon Alley trade magazine Alley Cat News for his
pioneering work at Audible.
Before founding Audible, Donald Katz was a successful author and journalist for
twenty years. He is the author of Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One
Middle-Class Family in Postwar America, which was 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 has served as a contributing editor
for Rolling Stone, Esquire, Outside, Sports Illustrated, Men's Journal, and
Worth, and his work has won or been nominated for several National Magazine
Awards. In 2001, Random House published 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. Katz also served as a
consultant on editorial, start-up, content development projects, and digital
media issues for Fidelity Investments, Whittle Communications, Wenner Media,
Time Warner, and Mariah Publications, and he has lectured widely on money and
business issues, journalism, and nonfiction literature at universities,
libraries, and corporate management gatherings.
Donald Katz graduated from New York University's honors program in English in
1974. He worked closely with writer-in-residence Ralph Ellison while at NYU. He
also attended The University of Chicago and The London School of Economics. He
holds an MSc Economics from The London School of Economics. He was born in
Chicago, Illinois, on January 30, 1952. He attended New Trier East High School
in Winnetka, Illinois. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife, Leslie
Larson, and their three children. Katz served as a member of the public library
board in Montclair for nine years. He serves on the board of Uncommon Schools,
which supports the pioneering Newark, New Jersey, charter school, North Star
Academy and similar schools, and he is an avid ice hockey player.
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