Yesterday evening Amazon announced their Amazon Matchmaker program. (h/t Goodereader and Gospel ebooks).
Amazon Matchmaker is a single location for Kindle books in your library that have Audible books that are matched through the whispersync program (where you can move back and forth seamlessly from audiobook to kindle book.)
I really like the concept of the whispersync. I love audiobooks and as long as the price is not much more, I am willing to purchase both for the ease of being able to move between the kindle book and audiobook. (Plus I prefer to re-read a book in a different format. So if I read first on kindle, I like to re-read on audio or vice versa.)
This is the first time Amazon has had all of the whispersync enabled books from your library in a single place. I have tried to get this info several times previously. When I asked Audible customer support they can told me what books that I already own on audiobook that have a kindle option. But they can’t tell me what kindle books that I own have an Audiobook option. And from Amazon’s side, they have told me that all I can do is go through my kindle books one by one from the Manage My Kindle page and look to see which one has the whispersync option.
So the fact that this is a one stop look is great news. But the implementation is awful. At least it is awful for those of us Kindle users that have large libraries. I have a large kindle book library (around 3500 kindle books and nearly 700 audiobook.)
The way Amazon is showing this information is 5 to 8 books at a time and then Amazon wants you to push ‘load more’ to keep going. I showed 80 or 100 books, but it was slow, not searchable, not ordered in any way that I could tell. What is worse is that you only see the cover image and the title. You could not click and get a book description or see book ratings. You can hear the sample and you do see the price (often discounted) but that is it. Once you click, you have purchased the book. One click is the only option.
I did see several books that had discounts that I was unaware of. So I want to pay attention to those, but there is no way to save those to a new wish list or in any other way save them in a priority list.
Amazon also announced that the Whispersync for Voice program doubled today to around 30,000 books. But until they get a good way for me to be able to find the books I want, this is going to be a hunt and peck option for me.
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This is not the Kindle Matchbook program (which gives you a discounted ebook with the purchase of a paperback.) The Kindle Matchbook program has not been formally released yet, but according to Amazon it will be released sometime this month.
The implementation is indeed a bit clunky, but it is a good start on addressing the challenges of finding matching audiobooks. Hopefully they’ll keep refining.
To get round only having the option of one click buying and not adding to wishlist I’ll probably search what I see on audible and add it to my favouties from there. Not ideal but will do the job
It will also work to just have two browser windows up. You can look at the Matchmaker window on the one side and then on the other type in the ones you are interested in and create a specific wishlist. That might be easier. But it would be better to just have those built in.
Because it has taken so long to implement this I expected more. But I do think they will make it better eventually.