In fact, audio is pulling in new audiences – whether that’s listeners who don’t usually buy books, or readers listening to genres in audio format that they wouldn’t pick up in print. While audiobook sales are up and physical book sales down, it’s not a given that the two things are related. With audiobooks, there’s a feeling that it’s an additive.” “Nobody is running scared from it, in comparison to the similar moment for ebooks where there was that fear that they were cannibalising other formats in the book world. “It’s the blue-eyed boy of publishing at the moment,” explains Fionnuala Barrett, editorial director of Audio at Harper Collins. Some authors are even skipping print and writing exclusive audio content.įor the publishing industry, which has faced its fair share of gloomy news stories over the past two decades, the boom in audio is widely regarded as good news. There are hugely ambitious productions using ensemble casts (the audio of George Saunders’ Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo features 166 different narrators), specially created soundscapes and technological advances such as surround-sound 3D audio.

Now audiobooks draw A-list talent – think Elisabeth Moss reading The Handmaid’s Tale, Meryl Streep narrating Charlotte’s Web or Michelle Obama reading all 19 hours of her own memoir, Becoming. Gone are the days of dusty cassette box-sets and stuffily-read versions of the classics. Compared with physical book sales, audio is the baby of the publishing world, but it is growing up fast.

Fast forward nearly 150 years, and he’d be pretty impressed to find more than 400,000 audiobooks available to download straight into his pocket.Īudiobooks are in the midst of a boom, with Deloitte predicting that the global market will grow by 25 per cent in 2020 to US$3.5 billion (£2.6 billion). Its fleece was white as snow.” As he created the first ever audio of the spoken word, Edison dreamed that the technology might one day allow a whole novel to be recorded. Leaning over his new machine one day he recited the words: “Mary had a little lamb. Back in 1878, shortly after he had invented the phonograph, Thomas Edison hit upon an idea.

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