Soundview Review and $15 Coupon Code For All Business Books

We have the following coupon code available for you to promote. Soundview Executive Book Summaries has given us $15 off any annual subscription. We are passing this to you, it is valid for the month during 2010

Soundview coupon code: $15OFF

If you’re like me you don’t have much time, and have a lot of books you would enjoy reading, as well as a lot of books you should read to make your online business better. You also may have a lot of dead time spend driving, waiting in line, or traveling. This is time you could spend listening to audio books on your ipod or laptop computer.

Enter Soundview. Soundview Executive Book Summaries provides audio excerpts from leading business and corporate books that you can listen to in a variety of digital formats including mp3 that will play in any audio player including the iPod, iTunes, WinAmp, Windows Media Player, Real Player, Quicktime, and any other software that recognizes mp3’s.

When I first browsed this service, it seemed bland and uninformative. Their website has a decidedly web 1.0 feel and looks like it was last updated in 1996, the design is exceedingly bland and very rough. It is hard to quickly find the important points of interest. I found myself scanning the page for key conversion elements and struggled to fine them. There best selling point is a free sample, and this button is buried in the left column barely above the fold on a 1080×768 monitor I don’t know what they want me to do and they hide a lot of their great content behind needless barriers. Soundview is completely behind their competitors.

What they do have going for them is an awesome domain name, summary.com this is a great generic name that is easy to remember and should capitalize on it. I would even recommend renaming the company to Summery.com and get rid of “Soundview Executive Book Summaries”. No one will remember the 4 word title, but people will easily remember Summery.com, and at this point this is a web only company anyway, their brick and mortar days (if there ever were any) are long gone. Take the risk and rename to .com, this is free advice and I just saved you listening to 1000 hours of your business audio books. If they don’t, Simply Audio Books will continue to grab their marketshare, and likely put Soundview out of business.

While I am skewering summery.com’s website I need to point out their wasted title tag and under performing search engine optimization efforts. This precious tag provides no benefit with their long 4 word unmemorable business name. People are searching for keywords “audio business book” “mba book on tape” “download business book” “business book mp3”. Their internal site search returned 417 books on marketing and no 2 books on search engine optimization, but they are by people I’ve never heard of and never mention SEO in the summaries.

This is not intended to be a review of the summary.com website, but I will bet a dollar to a doughnut that I could increase conversions in the double digits with a redesign.

I enjoyed listening to a demo of Stephen Covey’s The 8th Habit. You can listen to a summery of the Eighth Habit demo here, and here.

Here is the summary of the Steven Covey work on summary.com:

For individuals and organizations, excellence is no longer merely an option – survival requires it. But to thrive, excel and lead in our Knowledge Worker Age, we must move beyond effectiveness to greatness. Leadership guru Stephen Covey writes that accessing a higher level of human genius and motivation requires a sea change in thinking: a new mind-set and skill set – in short, an additional habit to those featured in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey explains that the crucial challenge is to find our own voice and inspire others to find theirs.

Purchase individual business book summaries in many different formats (from PDF to MP3) with over 300 titles available for instant download. Sounds good to me, and it should work well for any busy business owner who travels a lot.

The summaries I downloaded and listened to were about 10 minutes long, and cost $13. This seems like extortion and I can’t imagine people paying this much for a watered down cliffs notes version of a business book. $13 is way too much for a small audio file, why not get the entire audio book for $19? Soundview has a $169 1 year subscription deal that includes 12 monthly issues (30 summaries) delivered to your mailbox. Includes print and CD formats of the summaries, as well as free access to the online versions in your Online Library. This makes the cost of each business audio book summery $5.63.

Summary – Soundview has quality mp3 files, but they are way overpriced. Checkout a much better web based audio book solution Simply Audio Books.