Donald Katz (January 30, 1952[1]) is founder and CEO of Audible, Inc. Founded in 1995 and headquartered in Newark, NJ, Audible developed audible.com, the ecommerce web destination and the first system for distributing audio via the Internet for playback at or away from the PC. Audible also commercialized the first portable digital audio player in 1997. In 2004, Mr. Katz was awarded the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for New Jersey.[1] Audible was a publicly traded Nasdaq company until it was acquired and became a subsidiary of Amazon.com in early 2008.[2]
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Katz was born in Chicago, Illinois on January 30, 1952.[1] Katz graduated from New York University in 1974, and also attended The University of Chicago as well as The London School of Economics, from which he holds an MSc Economics.[1] He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.[1]
Before founding Audible, Katz was an author and journalist for twenty years.[1] He is the author of Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America (1992), nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears (1987), winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction; and Just Do It: The Nike Spirit in the Corporate World (1994).[1] Katz served as a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, Esquire, Outside, Sports Illustrated, Men's Journal and Worth.[1] He received an Overseas Press Club award for his coverage of foreign affairs, and his writing won or was nominated for several National Magazine Awards.[1] A two-volume collection of Katz's award-winning magazine stories, King of the Ferret Leggers and Other True Stories and Valley of the Fallen and Other Places was published in 2001.