WHEN we hear the phrase “e-book” we tend to think of digital books that you can read on a laptop, tablet or even mobile phone. These are digital replicas of print books with some added functionality like the ability to increase the size of the font, bookmarking and keyword search.
People normally don’t think of audiobooks as e-books though technically they are a kind of electronic book. You might be surprised to learn that for many years running now, audiobooks have been the fastest growing segment of the publishing sector.
In recent years, both the number of titles produced and the sales of audiobooks have boomed. Total sales of audiobooks in 2016 rose 18.2 per cent over 2015, to an estimated US$2.1 billion (RM8.83 billion), while unit sales did even better, according to the Audio Publishers Association (USA). It reported that unit sales rose 33.9 per cent, to 89.5 million.
Such statistics are convincing but if you wanted a simpler sign of audiobooks’ growing importance, just look at the fact that Kobo, a leading international e-book retailer, has just finally added audiobooks to its offerings. Amazon has long been associated with audiobooks through its subsidiary Audible but Kobo has been an audiobook hold-out for a long time. Until this month, that is. Now audiobooks are part of its iOS app catalogue.
The app has a built-in audiobook player that offers various cool functionalities such as the ability to change the narration speed, check the remaining time and set a sleep timer. Initially this service will be available in the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand but I’d expect that eventually, it will be rolled out all over the world.
You also know audiobooks have arrived when many Hollywood A-List stars are narrating them. And we’re not just talking about famous celebrities narrating their own biographies or memoirs but the works of other authors. Jake Gyllenhaal, for example, reads the The Great Gatsby while Tim Robbins reads Fahrenheit 451. Not to be outdone, Reese Witherspoon reads Harper Lee’s hit novel, Go Set a Watchman while Johnny Depp reads portions of Keith Richard’s biography, Life. Other big name celebrity narrators include Helen Mirren, Colin Firth, Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Angela Bassett, Cuba Gooding Jr, Whoopi Goldberg and Samuel L. Jackson.
Audiobooks’ popularity
While everyone acknowledges the popularity of audiobooks, industry watchers aren’t able to pinpoint the exact reason for this. Rather than just one factor, it’s probably a confluence of elements — celebrity narration, convenience and exposure due to podcasts, among others — that have resulted in the rise of audiobooks.
Of all the factors, convenience is probably the biggest plus point for audiobooks. You can listen to audiobooks while doing other things. That in itself is quite revolutionary when it comes to consuming books. When you read a print book or an e-book, it’s practically impossible to do anything else. This is why you hear the common refrain, “I don’t have time to read books”.
Our lives are so busy these days that the only way to consume content is to do it while multi-tasking. With audiobooks, you can listen to them while commuting in a car, walking your dog, jogging on a treadmill or riding a stationary bike, washing the dishes or ironing clothes.
Of course all of this is facilitated by advances in technology — the technology relating to audiobooks themselves and the technology involving the player. Audiobooks were known initially (this was a long, long time ago) as books on vinyl. Yes, they actually had audiobooks on vinyl records. Then it became books on tape. Then books on CDs. Today, audiobooks come in the form of a digital file which can be easily downloaded.
The player can be an iPod or some other MP3 device. But most people probably listen to their audiobooks on their mobile phones. With smartphones now being so common place, it’s no exaggeration to say that most people today carry some kind of audiobook player on them at all times.
The popularity of podcasts has also helped audiobooks in a couple of ways. Firstly, it gets people used to the notion of downloading a long audio file and listening to it on their MP3 player or mobile phone. When you’ve listened to a lot of podcasts, it’s not a stretch to start listening to books.
Secondly, many of the most popular podcasts are sponsored by Audible. If you’re a fan of podcasts, you’re probably familiar with the first season of Serial, a 12-episode crime programme about a murder. That podcast was a runaway success story with over five million downloads and streams. Slightly more than halfway through its dozen episodes, Serial featured a new sponsor: Audible.
This introduced millions of people to this Amazon-owned audiobook company, which offers both a subscription and an a la carte service. Audible also runs ads in other popular podcast programmes such as Slate podcasts, Radiolab and WTF with Marc Maron.
Although Audible started off as a retailer of audiobooks, it’s now a producer of original audio content as well. It has also introduced innovations such as “Clips” which allows users to share 45-second excerpts from their favourite audiobooks with friends via text messaging, e-mail and social media.
Creating audiobooks
All these things combined have made e-books popular with consumers. But audiobooks are also popular with publishers. Unlike print books, where there’s an additional cost with every copy of a book printed, audiobook files sit on a server so there’s very little incremental cost even if a million orders were to suddenly come in (there’d be some bandwidth costs but no printing, storage or distribution costs to the publisher).
Audiobooks also allow publishers to reach a market that it traditionally cannot penetrate: the non-readers. We all know of people who don’t have time for it — it might actually include us — and we also know those who simply don’t like reading. Then, there are those who have difficulty reading such as people with dyslexia. And finally there are those who can’t read at all, namely blind people. Audiobooks are accessible to all non-readers: The ones who don’t have time, who don’t like to read, who have difficulty reading and who cannot read.
Of course not all publishers are into audiobooks. While it’s starting to become quite commonplace in the West, most Malaysian publishers do not make audio versions of the books they publish. So what’s a Malaysian author to do if he or she wants their book to be made available as an audiobook?
In typical publishing contracts, the terms of publishing cover specific formats and are usually not all-encompassing. Just because you sign up for a print book to be published doesn’t mean you automatically sign away your rights for an e-book or an audiobook. Although a publisher could include such terms, the author can ask for these to be removed and reserve the right to do their own e-book or audiobook.
Authors who have retained such rights can undertake to create their own audiobooks. If an author doesn’t have experience in digital recording and editing — which I expect to be the case with most authors — then it makes sense for them to engage a professional to help create the audiobook.
Professional voice-over artists used to work for formal production houses but these days, thanks again to advances in technology and the Internet, many are freelancers who work from home. Their rates are also far more affordable than it used to be during the era of studio-based narrators. There are also many audiobook production companies that offer affordable rates. You can easily search for these online.
Although the surge in popularity of audiobooks was not something the publishing industry anticipated — most publishers thought e-books would be the next big thing — in retrospect it makes perfect sense that audiobooks would be a big hit. After all, who doesn’t like to listen to a good story?