Publishers embrace, and ponder, audiobooks’ rise
As the audiobook market continues to boom, publishers find themselves both grateful and concerned.
The industry gathered over the past week for Bookexpo and the fan-based Bookcon, which ended Sunday at the Jacob Javits centre in Manhattan. The consensus, as it has been for the past few years, is of a stable overall market: physical books rising, ebook sales soft and audio, led by downloaded works, expanding by double digits.
“We’ve had really significant growth,” Michael Pietsch, CEO of Hachette Book Group, told The Associated Press. “It’s offsetting the e-book decline.”
Authors and publishers alike celebrate the format’s appeal and creativity. The standard approach of a single narrator has given way to productions of remarkable ambition.
More than 100 voices were used for George Saunders’ historical reverie “Lincoln in the Bardo,” winner of the Audio Publishers Association’s “Audie” for the year’s best recording, a prize handed out during Bookexpo.
For some publishers, as many as 1 out of every 10 books sold is in the audio format, a percentage far higher than just a few years ago. And while the industry debated whether e-books expanded the market, or simply shifted it to digital reading, publishers agree that audio brings in new customers and allows them to encounter a narrative when a physical or e-book would be impossible – while driving, for instance, or doing housework.
But as the market thrives, competition grows and the industry looks warily at audio’s dominant seller, Amazon, and the Amazon-owned audio producer and distributor, Audible Inc.
“Audible has done a phenomenal job in creating their business and making it popular and branching it out. And they have become a very strong owner of that market to date. And that’s to their credit,” said Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy. “But with strong dominance in the market, problems come.”
Publishers wonder – they say it hasn’t happened yet – when Amazon will demand a greater share of audio revenues. They speak of Audible approaching writers directly. They have turned down deals because the agent was insisting that audio rights be negotiated separately, a conflict that arose during the early rise of e-books.
While major publishers are insisting that all rights be acquired together, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Grove Atlantic are among the houses with no audio divisions; those rights often go to Audible, at times for advances unthinkable until recently.