Thriving company rides the popularity of digital audio books
Thank you, Edgar Rice Burroughs.
For Kevin and Laura Colebank, that American author's classic book, "Tarzan of the Apes," was the entrée to the audiobook publishing world, the impetus for their company's name, Tantor Media, and the vital launch pad to a successful business that today employs 75 and produces 50 new titles a month from its Old Saybrook headquarters.
Not bad for a husband-and-wife team that had no prior experience in the industry.
In one decade, Tantor Audiobooks has transformed itself from a small startup with three people (including the husband-and-wife team and his brother) into a major independent audiobook publisher on the East Coast, with a roster of more than 70 narrators across the country and a wall full of industry awards and honors.
And about that name? Tantor, explains Laura Colebank, was Tarzan's elephant friend in "Tarzan of the Apes."
Inside the company's two office complexes in Old Saybrook, employees handle a variety of tasks, from gaining licenses to publish an audiobook from the original book publisher to technicians who oversee rows of computers and complex machinery that produces thousands of copies of CD audiobooks. The technology can print up to 15,000 CDs daily. It's literally a one-stop shop, where everything from the artwork for the audiobook cover to the marketing is done in house. "We do it all," says Kevin Colebank.
Adds Laura Colebank, "If someone needs one copy, we can do it. If they need ten thousand copies, we can do it." A typical audiobook, with multiple CDs, costs about $30 to $35, while an MP3 audio file costs about $25. (The MP3 CD costs less because one CD can hold up to almost 13 hours worth of a recording.)
The couple estimates that by the end of this year, their firm will be producing up to 1,800 titles of audiobooks.
And the firm continues to grow, say its owners. Today's book listeners are changing their habits, with many preferring to listen to books in an MP3 format. So, instead of a book covering 12 CDS, one single MP3 CD file can play the entire book. There's still a strong market for audiobooks on CDs, say the couple, but in today's downloadable world, habits are changing and so are the preferences of audiobook listeners.
In addition, the firm offers "Playaway"-style books. The book comes in a small compact player, sort of like a small iPod, with headphones. The book can be listened to more than once, of course, but the convenience is that the listener doesn't have to fiddle with CDs. Just pop the tiny headphone pods into your ears, and hit play.
Eventually, say the audiobook publishers, more listeners will want to simply download their choice of audiobook directly from Tantor's website (www.tantor.com) onto their computer's hard drive. They can, however, already download those books from iTunes and from www.Audible.com. For now, though, the industry is churning out millions of CDs or MP3 files to meet the needs of a growing listening audience.
According to the Audio Publishers Association, which represents the audiobook industry, CD sales represent a hefty 72 percent of the audio market, which ranges from audiobook sellers like the small, but growing, Tantor to industry behemoths like Amazon.com. Download sales, however, grew to 21 percent of the market (based on 2008 figures) and the industry expects that number to continue to increase. And the sale of so-called "preloaded" devices, such as the "playalong" books sold by Tantor, inched up to 3 percent of the total market. Cassette sales of audiobooks, once this industry's mainstay, have stayed stagnant since 2007, says the Audio Publishers Association, at around 3 percent.
Unabridged books, which represent the narrator reading the full work, not an edited version, make up nearly 85 percent of the audiobook market. That's good news for Tantor, which only publishes unabridged, original works.
The publishers' association also says that audiobooks have a long, and interesting, history among the reading (and increasingly common listening) public. In 1933, J.P. Harrington, an anthropologist, drove the length of this country to actually record the oral histories of Native American tribes. Of course, back then there was no digital technology, so the anthropologist was said to have recorded these histories on aluminum discs, using his car battery to power a turntable spinning those discs.
That's a long way away from today's technology at Tantor. Inside its separate production building in Old Saybrook, technicians oversee machinery that prints the book name and other information onto the CD disc. Then large computer towers take the master CD and burn copies in large volumes.
The company currently produces a host of popular, and best-selling, titles, including the top New York Times bestseller, "Three Cups of Tea," the non-fiction work by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin about building schools in impoverished areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Among other current titles are "Third World America," by political commentator Arianna Huffington and "Savages," a thriller by Don Winslow.
Tantor's modest beginnings began in San Clemente, California, in 2000 (literally above a garage). In 2004, the company moved to Old Saybrook (Laura Colebank has family locally) in a smaller location, and then relocated into its two buildings within an industrial park setting in Old Saybrook near Interstate 95.
While both Kevin and Laura Colebank today are steeped in the publishing and audiobook world, easily noting the popular authors and nimbly explaining the shifting technology, they both have diverse backgrounds that didn't include publishing. Kevin Colebank was trained in mechanical engineering and management, while Laura Colebank's background is in consumer marketing, which did prove helpful in the company's early days and still gives her a marketeer's vantage point today in the competitive audiobook world.
Tantor's customer base is as varied as its publishing works. It serves the library world with specially bound copies of its works (they're more rugged for the many times the audiobooks are loaned out), to online distribution, telephone and retail sales. Its website offers all its works for sale in the various formats and there's even a "bargain bin" link ...
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I was reading over some old posts on another blog and a ran across an article in May, 2oo8 about a union between Taiyo Yuden and JVC. JVC sold Taiyo Yuden a share in it's media business which they had put under the subsidiary Victor Company of Japan and it is now re-structured as Victor Advanced Media. There is documentation on the agreement between JVC and Taiyo Yuden to sell part of thel JVC media concern (Victor Company of Japan) in order to strengthen core businesses. So now since July 2008 the new company, Victor Advanced Media has been operating in Japan reselling Taiyo Yuden CDs and DVDs. This is a link to the original documentation from JVC Press Release May 26th,2008
On October 1st Taiyo Yuden announced: ...Following stock acquisition, Victor Advanced Media will be included in Taiyo Yuden’s scope of consolidation as a subsidiary company from the third quarter of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2009. The effect of the acquisition on the company’s consolidated performance for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2009 is expected to be insignificant.
Link to TY press release
So Taiyo Yuden now owns JVC media business which would include intellectual rights to the disc technology. Hmm I wonder what Taiyo Yuden wants with that? I guess we will see after March 31st, 2009
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Taiyo Yuden has recently released a new silver inkjet printable watershield recordable CD. It features a hub printable glossy silver surface and all the benefits of Taiyo Yuden's Water Shield CD. Designed for inkjet disc printers it dries very fast avoiding smudges. It is 52x compatible and comes packaged in 50 disc spindles.
Taiyo Yuden Watershield offers water resistance, glossy finish and an amazing silver print surface. Like regular silver inkjet printable CDs the surface has a iridescent depth unlike any other CD printable surface. Silver gives a reflective three dimensional image highlighting the color of the label. Silver surfaced printable discs looks better then a silk screened disc. Color mixing is incredible with Taiyo Yuden Watershield recordable CD discs.
Inkjet printable Taiyo Yuden Watershield provides an excellent method of disc printing using convenient ink-jet printing technology. Taiyo Yuden Watershield is ideal for printing with the leading disc printer manufacturers including Epson, Microboards, R-Quest, Primera, Rimage, MF Digital and Recordex.
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It is interesting to note that Digitimes had an article on Thursday, August 7, 2008 about the Optical Recordable Disc manufacturer, Prodisc, with CD-R, DVD-R, DVD+R and Dual Layer production lines in Taiwan and mainland China, clarifying it's position about the "rumors" that they were discontinuing optical disc product.
company chairman Ming-fa Lin:
""..Prodisc has invested more than NT$10 billion (about US$300 million) in production equipment of blank CD-R, DVD+/-R discs and has maintained a steady client base consisting of international vendors and overseas retail channels, the reason for not quitting production, Lin explained. Prodisc is negotiating with lending banks to seek their support for the company's planned turnaround and continuing production of optical discs.."
As reported by Digitimes IT news
This is after a report a day before in cens.com that Prodisc would be exiting the Optical business.
Essentially Prodisc is without capital and has plenty of troubles with Philips. It certainly would not be in Philips interest for Prodisc to exit the business although the issue is really with recordable CD production which is not as large a market as DVD which is not under the Philips royalty. The real issue is with the razor thin gross profits that translate into a loss every year and yet CMC, Ritek and Prodisc keep slugging it out. It's hard to imagine how Prodisc can continue but then it's hard to see how any of the Taiwan Optical manufacturers can continue. They continue to drop the cost of blank discs even though the manufacturing costs keep going up leaving no profit at all. They all are scrambling to shift over to other storage products like USB flash and flash cards. Prodisc has been working on a film production project producing brightness enhancement film (BEF) as well as LED lamps and aspherical polycarbonate ophthalmic lenses with a Japanese company, Omron.
These are the major manufacturers of inexpensive recordable CD-R, recordable DVD, and at least for CMC and Ritek: Blu-ray recordable manufacturing. They have driven the market hard in OEM and branded media making it a very non-economical operation. I'm certainly amazed that Prodisc would invest 300 million dollars for production equipment expecting a return on the investment.
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According to Digitimes Prodisc is planning to discontinue CD-R production. This is the continuing saga of the Philips action against several Taiwan CD-R manufacturers over royalty payments.
CMC, Ritek and Prodisc have been in negotiation with Philips since last year when the last license ran out. Digitimes had pointed out that the troubles for Prodisc really started with them publicly
protesting how unfair the royalty program is. Philips requested and received a request to seize assets of Prodisc in Taiwan which includes a manufacturing facility and money in a bank account.
Stay Tuned
This is a link to the full story Digitimes article
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