Skip Right to the Sex With Audible's New Feature

Several new options cater to audiobook service's romance readers
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 2, 2017 12:15 PM CDT
Audiobook Service Lets Users Skip to Sex Scenes
Stock photo   (Getty Images/Nastia11)

Flipping through dozens of pages of Fifty Shades of Grey to find a sex scene may soon be a thing of the past. Catering to impatient romance readers, audiobook website Audible has introduced a feature allowing visitors to skip to especially romantic scenes—from first kisses to steamy sex romps—in more than 100 of its romance titles. This modern-day "version of the dog-eared erotica page" accompanies a new "steaminess score" for books (options include "sweet," "hot damn," and "O-O-OMG"), as well as a new Audible subscription service, reports Quartz. While normal Audible subscribers get access to one audiobook per month, subscribers to the Audible Romance Package gain access to thousands of novels "performed by the steamiest voices."

About 110 of those audiobooks—sorted into clickable categories as specific as "hockey player," "age gap," and "brought together by a bet"—will now come with a button reading: "Take me to the good part." So far, subscribers are using this feature in different ways, Audible's chief content officer, Andy Gaies, tells the Verge. Some want to listen to such excerpts before purchasing a book, some want to relive a favorite scene, and some use the feature to jump to particular events, like proposals, he says. "Romance fans are a unique group," Gaies adds, noting many "consume four, five, six books a week." This helps explain why there are substantially more romance books published annually in the US than books of any other fiction genre, per Quartz. (More books stories.)

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