[3][4] The company's first product was an eponymous portable media player known as the Audible MobilePlayer; released in 1997, the device contained around four megabytes of on-board flash memory storage, which could hold up to two hours of audio.

[9] Development proceeded, however, leading to Audible licensing the ACELP codec for its downloads in 2000,[10] and Amazon bought a 5 percent stake in the then-publicly traded company the same year.

[11] Two years later, the service released "Audible Air," which allowed users to download audiobooks directly to PDAs and smartphones.

[16] In March 2012, Audible launched the A-List Collection, a series showcasing Hollywood stars including Claire Danes, Colin Firth, Anne Hathaway, Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L. Jackson, Diane Keaton, Nicole Kidman, and Kate Winslet performing great works of literature.

[18] In September 2012, Audible introduced a feature known as "Whispersync for Voice," which allows users to continue audiobooks from where they left off reading them on Amazon Kindle.

[4] In July 2019, a new feature was announced called Audible Captions, in which machine-generated text would be displayed alongside the audio narration.

[24] Content includes books of all genres, as well as radio shows (classic and current), speeches, interviews, stand-up comedy, and audio versions of periodicals such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

[31] Nuzum compared this strategy to original content created by HBO or Netflix,[32][33] and stated that the service deliberately avoided use of the word "podcast" as to not alienate listeners unfamiliar with the concept.

This move came amid a shift in Audible's original content strategy, including a greater focus on "audiobook-first" deals with writers.

[41][42][43] The service added a new tier for subscribers to access Audible Originals, announced in fall 2020, called Premium Plus, including over 11,000 titles (as of the launch).

[44] These titles included earlier original material, plus new audio productions featuring such creators as Common, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kate Mara, Harvey Fierstein, Michael Caine and Jesse Eisenberg.

[45] More recent releases include Newark Mayor Ras Baraka's memoir [46] and two works by Brown Sugar screenwriter Michael Elliot.

Kerry Washington and Daniel Dae Kim performed main roles in an adapation of the Broadway play David Henry Hwang's "Yellow Face" exploring themes of cultural appropriation.

Audible is also compatible with various accessibility devices for people with visual impairments or blindness, including Swiss engineering firm Bones AG's Milestone 212 and 312 and EssilorLuxottica Humanware's Victor Reader Stream 2 and 3.

[61] There were hopes[62] that Amazon, after its purchase of Audible, would remove the DRM from its audiobook selection, in keeping with the current trend in the industry.