Seattle (WA) - Amazon announced today that it will buy Audible, an online creator and seller of digital audiobooks, for around $300 million and paid mostly in cash.

Audible offers over 80,000 titles ranging from text books to articles from the New York Times. It also produces original content. It offers numerous titles to iTunes, and has an "all you can eat" package on audible.com, giving subscribers unlimited access to its collection for a monthly fee.

Under the terms of the deal, Amazon will buy all Audible shares for $11.50 each. The online retailer did not elaborate on how it will incorporate Audible into Amazon.com’s main site.

In the past year, Amazon has widely increased its place in the digital download market. It launched Amazon Unbox for movie and TV content, created the Kindle electronic reading device and a new digital storefront for that, and most recently began offering MP3 music downloads without any copy protection.

The deal is expected to close by the end of the second quarter of this year.