• AP, Friday, February 1, 2008 11:45 AM

Amazon.com is buying online audio book seller Audible Inc.--whose catalog includes about 80,000 audio books, radio programs, spoken word selections and other digital content for download--for $300 million. The offer of $11.50 per share represents a 23% premium over Audible's closing price Wednesday. Audible's brand and Web sites will continue to operate.

The companies have been partners since 2000, when they launched an e-book and audio-book store on Amazon.com companies with Microsoft. Increasing the amount of digital content Amazon sells will help the company improve margins.

In the last year, Amazon has bulked up its own digital content offerings, which include the Unbox movie download service, an MP3 music store and Kindle, the retailer's e-book reader and accompanying store, which stocks 90,000 books, newspapers and other content and can play Audible files.

Read the whole story at AP »