Don Katz
Founder of Audible.com, author, and journalist
Donald R. Katz (born January 30, 1952) is an American author and businessman.
He is the founder and longtime CEO of Audible, Inc. Founded in 1995 and headquartered in Newark, New Jersey, Audible.com offers audiobooks and similar products. Audible also introduced the first widely-used portable digital audio player in 1997, four years before the introduction of the iPod. In 2004, Katz was awarded the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for New Jersey. Audible was a publicly traded Nasdaq company until it was acquired and became a subsidiary of Amazon.com in early 2008. Audible operates digital storefronts in the US, UK, Germany, France, Australia, Italy, Japan, Canada, India and Spain.
Named one of NJ.com's "25 Most Influential People in New Jersey" in 2016, Katz has also been recognized as one of America's Top 25 Disruptive Leaders by Living Cities for his work on behalf of urban transformation in Newark. Katz was the recipient of a Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award in 2013. In 2022, Katz was named a PEN America Business Visionary Honoree and was awarded the Innovator Tribute at the Gotham Awards.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Don Katz” as founder of Audible.com, author, and journalist. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as founder of Audible.com, author, and journalist. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5292887. The first chronological checks are 1952, 1995, 1997 and 2004.
Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.
- Establishing names and roles
- Building a first chronology
- Locating cited institutions
Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Don Katz”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Don Katz primary sources, Don Katz archive and Katz research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Don Katz”?
- How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
- Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Don Katz” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.