Audible’s Lee Jarit, center, spoke wih author Michael Miller and The Bookseller’s Molly Flatt at London Book Fair. Image: StillMoving Ltd., Chris Ratcliffe
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Q4 2024 Was Audible’s Biggest Quarter in Subscriber Growth
Having looked ahead on Tuesday (March 18) at the upcoming four-hour “Audio Forum” being staged on April 2 by Jacks Thomas‘ Bologna Book Plus at Bologna Children’s Book Fair (March 31 to April 3), we have today (March 19) some of updated information on audiobooks provided at London Book Fair last week.
Lee Jarit, Audible‘s global lead in publisher and partner relations—who was with us at Frankfurter Buchmesse in October, speaking in our Publishing Perspectives Forum—was in London Book Fair’s “Author HQ” programming.
As many of our international publishing-industry readership is aware, London has a long track record of including content relevant to the United Kingdom’s large community of self-publishing authors. And Audible, an Amazon company, has focused some of its services for years now on its “Audiobook Creation Exchange” offer, ACX, a kind of audiobook analog to the self-publishing facilities offered to writers by the parent company.
According to Jarit, more than 31 percent of Audible’s overall catalogue is made up of ACX-produced audiobooks.
In 2024, the data Jarit offered pointed to ACX-title listening as being up 40 percent, presumably over that of 2023.
- Taking a higher-level view of Audible’s inventory, the company saw a more-than 15-percent jump in audiobook listening-hours in children’s content.
- In the past 18 months, Jarit told his audience, the company saw a jump of more than 50 percent in international listening time, that boost registering in romance titles.
- In that same 18-month time frame, the company cites an increase of more than 30 percent in science-fiction and fantasy.
True to much of the understanding of audiobooks’ growth, particularly in the United States’ and United Kingdom’s markets, Audible’s fastest-growing age demographic lies between 18 and 35.
We’d like to know—and Jarit’s offices are kindly checking to see what statistics they have—whether Audible’s surveys of its operations indicate distinctions in how much audiobooks may be attracting male users by comparison to female users.
This is because one of the research trends in digitally downloaded audiobook consumerism has been—at some times and in some markets, including the UK—a tendency to attract guys who may, in other formats, be “reluctant readers.” Audiobooks consistently register with survey respondents of both genders as popular because they can be consumed while doing other things, and this format-flexibility seems to be one of the factors making book-listening more attractive to boys and men than “sitting down and reading a book,” although girls and women are traditionally in the lead in reading and book-buying.
A Goal: Voicing the Unrecorded Backlists
Along with many others in the international industry, Jarit and his team, he says, are interested in finding ways to bring books not yet available in audio editions to consumers by means of automated production. This is frequently referred to as “AI,” although the production of books with non-human readers is less about intelligence than artificiality in the recorded voice. Several long-running vendors in the area predate the near-constant use of “AI” to refer to anything automated, such as Speechki, which was founded in 2019.
While the question of artificial voicing is difficult for gifted human readers of audiobooks, of course, it does appear the best hope for many publishers’ backlists that could be prohibitively expensive to produce in audio editions using human readers. One potentially useful approach may lie in the sampling of human readers’ voices for paid use in automated recordings.
On ACX, a voice-replication beta allows narrators to create and monetize replicas of their own voices so they can maximize earning potential, as Jarit’s audience learned in London. The company sees it as “a cost-effective opportunity for narrators to do additional work outside the bounds of what they could narrate in a day.”
Overall, some more quick statistics from Audible:
- The company says its member base is “at an all-time high, growing by more than 9 percent, year-over-year
- The fourth quarter of 2024, when Jarit was with us at Frankfurt, was the company’s best quarter for subscriber growth
- Year-over-year from 2023 to 2024, listening time by members on Audible’s subscription plans and customers purchasing titles a-la-carte was up more than 16 percent
- The company also notes a substantial increase it reports as 40 percent in customers who opt to purchase extra titles outside those provided by their membership credits; the company sees this as a sign that customers “are becoming more habituated to listening.”
There’s more data on audiobooks in the US market in the 2024-ending StatShot report from the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and you can find our report on it here. It is of interest to those reading closely that digital audio stood at an 11.3-percent share of the US market in 2024 by format, despite a 23.8-percent gain, at US$1.1 billion in revenue.
More from Publishing Perspectives on London Book Fair is here, more on world publishing’s trade shows and book fairs is here, and more on audiobooks is here.
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