Technology >> CEO Interviews >> October 4, 2004

DONALD KATZ – AUDIBLE INC (ADBL)

DONALD R. KATZ is Founder, Chief Executive Officer 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, New Jersey, 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. Mr. 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, Mr. Katz was a successful author and journalist for 20 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. Mr. 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 Mr. Katz's award-winning magazine stories, King of the Ferret Leggers and Other True Stories and Valley of the Fallen and Other Places. Mr. Katz also served as a consultant on editorial, startup, 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. Mr. Katz graduated from New York University's honor program in English in 1974. He also attended The University of Chicago and The London School of Economics. He holds an MSc in Economics from The London School of Economics. Profile
TWST: Please begin with a brief history of Audible and an overview of

your products and operations.

Mr. Katz: Audible was founded in late 1995. For the first two years of

our existence our