Quote:
Originally Posted by tubemonkey
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Look for more The Great Courses audios as Audible Daily Deals.
That's my prognostication, based upon some hard facts. First, the last major sale by Audible featured a ship-load of The Great Courses titles. Odd, I thought, when I noticed that, but I really didn't give it much more thought.
But being inclined to buy yesterday's Daily Deals The Great Courses' _Language Families_, I went over to The Great Courses' website to see what additional information that I could find out about that Audible audio course
du jour. The audio course wasn't there! The DVD, and another video format were, but not the _audio. Looking further, I noticed that it is now an "Audible Exclusive!" I don't know how many The Great Courses audio titles are like that, but I have to believe that it's a lot--maybe all of them! It looks as though The Great Courses may be wanting to move to video courses exclusively.
In the short term, I think that this is a positive thing for audiophiles of the educational bent. I used $1 per hour of lectures as a benchmark of a really great price when The Great Courses had a sale on an audio course. Rarely did they get quite there. Whenever Audible had one of the courses in one of their sales, it was always much less expensive per hour of lectures than you could ever get in any of The Great Courses sales. And the content ended up always being well less than $1/hour.
In the short term, of course (no pun intended, but that worked out rather well, didn't it?), it's a boon to people like yours truly. In the long term, well . . . I have some concerns. How long will it be before Uncle Jeffery (sp?) (Bezos) will be looking for another world to conquer, and he casts his longing eyes on the DVD educational market? And if he achieves complete, or nearly complete, dominance of it, how could that possibly good for consumer prices in the long run?