Audible.com, bought by Amazon in 2008, is a leading provider in audiobooks for your Kindle, tablet or smartphone.  Before now, in order to get their audiobooks onto your Kindle you had to download the file and transfer is by USB cable from your computer to your kindle.  The new Kindle now allows you to download the files straight to your device.  You can of course use the old method if you please.  Luddite.

If you don’t know how it works, Audible.com runs on plans either paid monthly or yearly.  Gold plans give you one credit for an audiobook per month and platinum plans give you two credits.  Additional books are 30% off.  Right now, the Kindle blog reports that they are having a promotional 30-day trial with two free audiobooks included.

According to the blog over 50,000 titles are available for download, including:

Hear Donald Sutherland breathe life into The Old Man and the Sea; Listen to Frank Brady recount the remarkable arc of Bobby Fischer’s life in Endgame; Kathryn Stockett’s The Help is illuminated by three different narrators who portray the maids and the white families they toil for in 1960s Mississippi.

Makes sense, as Donald Sutherland is looking more and more like Hemingway every day.  Does this sound good, guys?  Or would you rather keep your audiobooks on devices that are small enough to fit into your pocket?

Audible is a provider of spoken word audio content, which fits well enough with Amazon’s traditional bookselling business.  The key recent development is the introduction of Kindle; in the product description of what most people see as an ebook reader, one section points out, "With Kindle, you are able to download and enjoy thousands of audiobooks from Audible.com."

So some price adjustments or store integrations may occur as a result of the acquisition, although there’s no word on either front just yet.  Meanwhile, Audible’s stock has jumped by about 20 percent, while Amazon’s remains slightly down after a less-than-stellar earnings report.

As for the future, Steve Kessel, Amazon’s senior vice president for worldwide digital media, was willing to state, "Audible.com offers the best customer experience, the widest content selection and the broadest device compatibility in the industry.  Working together, we can introduce more innovations and bring this format to an even wider audience."

Keep a sharp eye out for Kindle 2.0, then, if the first generation didn’t suit your fancy (and perhaps even if it did).