Audible Story House
The full hardware and software system behind Audible’s “bookless bookstore”: 1,000+ titles on RFID/NFC tiles, custom illuminated readers, and a month of nonstop public use.
- Client
- Audible (Amazon)
- Company
- Smooth Technology
- Role
- Lead software & firmware architect and developer
- Disciplines
- Software, Electronics & Connected Products, Experiential Design
For Audible’s month-long Story House activation in New York, visitors browsed a multi-floor “bookless bookstore” of physical Story Tiles, each one an audiobook embedded with RFID and NFC. Placing a tile on one of our illuminated readers triggered lighting and an audio preview. Tapping it with a phone opened the title in the Audible app.
We designed and built the whole ecosystem: a catalog of more than 1,000 titles with metadata, cover art, tag associations and preview audio; the database and content-management workflows; the playback system; and the custom RFID hardware and lighting throughout the space.
The main engineering goal was reliability at scale. The system ran continuously for a month with thousands of interactions a day, and stayed updatable throughout the run. It was covered by The New York Times, USA Today and Time Out.
