Okay. The
Audible "Hidden Gems Sale" has arrived. I've had a chance to examine most of the
non-fiction offerings. For the benefit of fellow Mobilereaders, I'd like to share some of what I found out.
Call me unimpressed.
The audiobooks have high to very high ratings, but when you go to the corresponding Amazon webpage for a book, you usually find that it is not nearly as highly rated as the audiobook. You dig into the ratings for the books and you find that there are various reasons for that. But the upshot is that they mostly are a bunch of stinkeroos. For legal reasons, I will add "imho."
The mystery is how the audiobooks get such great ratings and the ebooks don't. Is there some mesmerizing or soothing quality to the narrator's voice that listeners find delight in? I don't know, I didn't investigate that.
What may be as much of a mystery is why almost all of the books (keep in mind that I only know about the
non-fiction books) follow that pattern--high audiobook ratings; low ebook ratings. It almost seems purposeful. If they were physical products--audio CDs or whatever--that were not selling well, I could see why Audible might want to make them look as good as possible so that they could clear them out of the way (a "clearance"), but with them being digital products, I just don't understand why Audible would want to do that. I guess that that's way above my pay grade. Thankfully.
The one non-fiction audiobook that seems to have some promise is
Raise the Bar: An Action-Based Method for Maximum Customer Reactions, by Jon Taffer. The ratings for both the audiobook and ebook have great ratings (4.50 and 4.6, respectively). Just a heads up, though: the ebook frequently drops to $1.99 (it's $5.99 now), it was $1.99 for several days a few weeks ago. If you wait around, you should be able to catch the Whispersync deal at $3.98--just 3 pennies more than the $3.95 "gems" price for the audio alone.
The "gems" must be hidden well.
Really hidden well. I've looked and I can't find them.