Skip to Content

Audiobooks

Audiobooks seize market share

12 March 2018

At this week's conference of the Independent Publishers' Guild, Jo Forshaw talked about the way in which the audio market is opening up, beginning to provide a challenge to ebooks.  Read more

US ebook sales decline but audio downloads boom

30 October 2017

Newly released figures show that ebook revenues in the US have declined again. In the first half of 2017, e-book sales declined by 4.6%, according to the Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies. All other categories, apart from paperback books saw increased revenues in the same time period.  Read more

Top 50 publishers mixed results but US audio downloads boom

11 September 2017

Mixed fortunes for world's 50 largest publishers are shown in a recent report but more recent figures for US audio downloads show that they have been booming.
  Read more

Good news all round

26 June 2017

Good news all round this week, with spectacular audiobook sale increases in the US and surprising figures showing that Millennials are the most likely generation of Americans to use public libraries. In the UK children's titles are continuing to outperform the market.  Read more

Audiobooks grab a young audience

11 July 2016

Not content with deciding they prefer print books to ebooks, young people are further confounding expectations by showing a growing enthusiasm for audiobooks.  Read more

Audiobook to download

27 July 2015

According to some sources, the audiobook market is growing rapidly. Orion audio publisher Pandora White called the sector "the fastest-growing in publishing" and Booktrack is growing exponentially, but is the quality of the recordings being sacrificed in order to achieve the lowest price?  Read more

Audiobooks - still seeking an audience?

3 December 2012

 Audiobooks have long been the Cinderellas of the publishing business, with many anticipated new dawns which have failed to produce much bigger sales.  Read more

Amazon grabs Audible

25 February 2008

The recent news of the $300m (£153m) Amazon purchase of Audible, the digital audiobooks site, has made it the market leader. At a stroke this gives the Internet retailer a ready-made subscriber base and access to 80,000 spoken word titles which it can sell through all its channels, including its new Kindle e-book reader.  Read more

Downloads lead the audio revolution

28 May 2007

Audiobooks are finding a new market amongst the iPod generation. Last week News Review looked at recent developments in audio, including rental, but it is downloads which offer the biggest growth opportunities.  Read more

Audiobooks – decline or comeback?

21 May 2007

The audio market is at last becoming sexy as it moves towards the new world of downloadable sound.   Read more

Syndicate content

Linked items...

13 January 2020 - What's new

January 2020
  • ‘Writers make everybody nervous but we terrify Silly Service workers. Our apartments always look like a front for something, and no matter how carefully we tidy up for guests we always seem to miss the note card that says, "Margaret has to die soon." We own the kind of books that spies use to construct codes, like The Letters of Mme.
  Read more

"Margaret has to die soon."

13 January 2020

‘Writers make everybody nervous but we terrify Silly Service workers. Our apartments always look like a front for something, and no matter how carefully we tidy up for guests we always seem to miss the note card that says, "Margaret has to die soon." We own the kind of books that spies use to construct codes, like The Letters of Mme.  Read more

'If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research.'

— Wilson Mizner