Amazon to buy audio bookseller Audible

Seattle: Web retailer Amazon.com said on Thursday it will buy online audio book seller Audible for $300 million (201.75 million euro) in a bid to expand its reach in digital audio content.

Amazon said it agreed to buy Newark, New Jersey-based Audible for $11.50 per share, a 23 per cent premium over Wednesday's closing price.

Audible's catalogue includes about 80,000 audio books, radio programs, spoken word selections and other digital content for download.

Amazon and Audible have been partners since 2000, when the companies, with Microsoft, launched an e-book and audio-book store on Amazon.com.

In the last year, Amazon has bulked up its own digital content offerings, which include the Unbox movie download service, an MP3 music store and Kindle, the retailer's e-book reader and accompanying store, which stocks 90,000 books, newspapers and other content.

Increasing the amount of digital content Amazon sells will help the company improve margins - the weak spot in Wednesday's earnings report that spooked Wall Street into an after-hours sell-off of the company's shares.