I'm about to go on a long car ride, decide that opposed to starting a new audible book I want to continue the book I just started reading on my Kindle. I pull up Audible, get the book, have it automatically sent to my Windows Phone Audible app, and done, I’m ready to go.

Upon getting into the car, I plug a million wires from my phone into my car (sadly no Bluetooth audio), pull up Audible and I’m completely surprised to discover that the Audible book that downloaded started off exactly where I stopped reading.

I rarely have ‘favorite’ things (ask Jillian what my favorite anything is), but this is definitely a favorite thing. Something that complete changed a completely reasonable expectation. Would it have been horrible to have to fast forward through the audio book to get to where I had left off in the written book? Not at all. But the type of innovation that takes a reasonable user expectation, sets it aside and tells the user that they won’t be doing that anymore, that is the type of innovation that I find so exciting.

How do they do it? Best I can tell, they use their so called ‘Whispersync’ technology to communicate the Amazon reading location across devices (the Amazon reading location is a more granular piece of data stored throughout the book that is more useful than just 'page number'). This must mean that they somehow track the Amazon reading location even in audio books.

Way to go Amazon. Now if you would just put the same intentionality and care into how you treat your employees.

Woodstock Writings