Over his impressive 27 years with Audible, Senior Software Development Engineer Alexander Galkin has had a front-row seat to the evolution of mobile technology, audiobooks and listening. He first joined us in 1998, when Audible was a startup. “I think I was employee number 27,” he muses. Although Alexander started as an engineer and has remained an engineer for his entire career, he’s continually learning new technologies and pushing boundaries for the benefit of Audible customers.

When Alexander started working at Audible, the world was just waking up to the possibilities of digital and internet technology. One audiobook required several cassette tapes or CDs, and the players were a bit cumbersome for listening on the move. In fact, it was while jogging that Audible’s founder Don Katz famously had the idea of giving people access to entire audiobooks by digitizing them. “I was very inspired by Don’s vision that we are changing people’s lives,” Alexander says. “I wanted to be part of that mission.”

Publishers would send us large boxes of cassette tapes to “rip” to a digital format (editing out cues such as “this is the end of side B, so turn the tape over”). Alexander remembers, “There was a bell they used to ring whenever we acquired new content or made any sort of book deal. Eventually the bell was ringing constantly, so we retired it." 

Even if Audible was able to digitize audio, there were no devices to consume content that way. So Alexander’s team invented one. The Audible Player, the world’s first commercially available portable digital audio player, started with one megabyte of memory and no screen. “We had to figure out how to fit as much audio as possible in that small space.” Also, the team had to figure out how to download large audio files using the internet’s slow dial-up speed of 28 kilobytes per second (for context, today’s typical 100Mbps household internet speed is about 35,000 times faster). In addition, “it was very difficult to explain to people what a digital player was and how it worked. I recall people, after placing an order, would call us and say, ‘where’s my cassette?’ Audio listening didn’t exist before Audible, not like this.” 

Of course, pioneering a whole new media category meant “we had to be very agile,” and the engineering team faced unprecedented technology and product challenges, which was exciting for Alexander. And then in 1999, Audible went public. There’s a photograph of that moment, hanging in our museum at our Newark, New Jersey headquarters. In it, Alexander grins beside Don and his colleagues who had helped build Audible from the ground up. “It was very hard to become profitable during the dot com boom, but we made it,” he laughs. After that, “we moved into a different phase of our existence.” 

Would we be able to edit to something like: Another major turning point for Alexander’s team was when, in 2003, Apple made Audible part of its iTunes Music Store ecosystem. “We became the sole audiobook provider for Apple devices,” says Alexander. “It was a key to Audible’s success in those early stages of our company” and allowed many more customers to discover listening with us.

In 2012, Alexander had one of his proudest achievements when he helped to innovate a synching technology that allows customers to read a book an Amazon Kindle, put it down, then pick up the Audible narration right where they left off. “I consider this a breakthrough invention,” he says, “and it’s an offering that is unique to Audible." 

Over the years, Alexander’s team has worked with some incredible technological advancements for the benefit of Audible customers, from memory improvements that allowed them to fit more content onto devices, to being able to improve sound quality, to benefitting from increases in internet download speeds. “It’s been a very interesting journey. Almost every month, something improved.”

Now Alexander and Audible’s technological teams are working with groundbreaking new technologies like AI. For instance, harnessing AI to enhance search and discovery of Audible content and, through a beta offering, enabling indie creators to use voice replica technology to expand their capacity for audiobook production. As he reflects on the evolution of technology and listening over the last few decades, Alexander says there has always been resistance to technological advancements, but he would implore people to embrace them instead. “By embracing technology, they can expand their outreach, they can expand their options; technology can benefit them.” He notes that while the technology constantly changes, the original vision that inspired Alexander has stayed the same: to bring Audible customers experiences that were never before possible.

Alexander has some advice for his younger self, just starting out in his career at Audible: Do not be afraid of trying and failing. “Not everything will succeed, but by trying, you push the boundaries. Not everything worked, but if we had not failed, we’d not be where we are at all.” 

As for anyone interested in joining Audible, he says: “You have opportunities now that we never imagined we would have, and the resources. You can use technology to push boundaries for customers around the world now, and you have all the support you can imagine. It’s a privilege to be a part of Audible.”