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Starbucks ever-expanding media empire continues to inspire fear in indies

An article in today’s L.A. Times should have indie booksellers quaking in their boots – Starbucks is continuing its slow, inexorable crawl toward becoming a jack-of-all-trades in the media arena with the addition of audiobooks to its offerings.

They’ve hopped into bed with Random House, who are fronting the Meryl Streep-narrated audiobooks The Velveteen Rabbit and The Night Before Christmas, which, in a canny money-saving move, were poached from a decades-old series of audiobooks called Rabbit Ears, according to senior vice-president and publisher of Random House Audio Madeline McIntosh.

These new offerings will sit alongside the raft of entertainment products, like CDs and DVDs, already available in the hundreds of Starbucks around the world, and seems to show Starbucks’ making good on their earlier plans to, as In Other Media linked to at the beginning of the month, “find more movie and book projects to market.”

You’ve been warned.

Related links:
Check out the L.A. Times story
Check out our previous blogposting, Grande Promo

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