Ben Bova and Orson Scott Card

It was a pleasure to have some excellent commentary from 2 brillant writers on the subject of audible books. I have been a fan of audible books for over 15 years and have not really put that much thought into the verbal tradition of storytelling. I loved the enthusiasm expressed by all 3 creators. I think this is something any audible listener would enjoy checking out, even if they are not sci-fi fans. Thanks for this fun audible freebie. Keep up the great work.

I wonder if Orson Scott Card listens to audible. He mentions that he listens to audiobooks, but it seems that he supports going Barnes&Noble and paying $40 or $50 bucks for an audiobook instead of paying an average of $13 dollars a book by purchasing from Audible. My guess is that maybe he sees a service such as Audible as cutting into his profits as an author. In this program he stated that Sci-Fi fans tend to be of a higher intelligence. This is because they tend to be techies and geeks. This is true enough at least in my case. I personally don't claim great intelligence but I am at least as smart as anyone on the planet earth. So I would like to use that and a little basic economics to state a small case. If Orson Scott Card doesn't support audible because he feels that they cut into his profits as an author from a purely economic standpoint this doesn't make any sense. I would venture to say that a majority of listeners would probably not listen if they had to pay the going rates at your average bookstore. $13 is affordable $40 sends me to the local library where his books are free. Audible and Ipods have created a whole new market for Mr.Card and many other authors simply because it's affordable. So economically even if they have to take a smaller cut they still make more money simply because more sales volume at a lesser price almost always equals more money. Besides I can't believe that the authors recieve to terribly much more from an audiobook bought at Border's compared to audible. There's probably tremendous overhead with production and packaging cd's or tapes and tremedous markup on the price because BAM has millions in overhead. With audible there is no packaging cost and overhead is low. So how can he or any author really lose. For someone to insist that MegaBuck books is the place to buy audiobooks is ridiculous. Maybe I'm off here,I'd like to know what Mr.Card's opinion is on the subject. Does he lose; do other writters lose, when the consumer win?