Before beginning your collection of digital audio books, you should ask the following questions of the vendor:
How large is your master collection of digital audiobooks?
There is no one vendor which has a large quantity of digital audio books. Even those vendors who are in the CD and cassette business are in the process of digitizing their audio. Some vendors have 4-5,000 titles and others have less than that.
Ask how many titles they are adding and how often. Ask how many publishing partners they have. Some vendors have a number of publishing partners for content and some have very few.
What percentage of the titles are frontlist (published in the past 36 months)? As with print books, readers want the latest, the newest, the bestsellers.
What percentage of titles are unabridged? As stated before, most readers prefer unabridged and will not check out an abridged book. What are the subject and genre strengths? This is important to meet the needs of your particular reading population.
What percentage of titles are fiction vx. non-fiction? Digital audio book vendors' master collections seem to be a little heavy on fiction and a little light on non-fiction. This comes at a time when the overall trend of the reading public is leaning toward non-fiction.