11/24/2023 0 Comments Audiobooks jobs readersIt is a bridge for those for whom reading and literacy is a challenge – for example, you don’t have to know how to pronounce big words and you can gather the meaning from context, you won’t be put off by the size of a big book.” De Waal’s son, Luke, has dyslexia, and audiobooks have been a lifeline to the world of books for him. “They enable the time-poor to stay in touch with reading. I asked her why she felt audiobooks were so important. De Waal is a patron of the audiobook charity Listening Books, which provides more than 50,000 people in the UK who have difficulty reading physical books with discounted access to audiobooks. One book I loved both in print and in the superb audiobook narrated by Lenny Henry is Kit de Waal’s My Name Is Leon. “We’ve seen a surge of interest in nonfiction stories which examine issues of race, equality and privilege,” he tells me, citing Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Akala’s Natives and Afua Hirsch’s We Need to Talk About the British Empire. Sean McManus, senior director of content at Audible, recognises this move towards serious nonfiction, particularly when it comes to books that help people make sense of a sometimes bafflingly complex news cycle. “You can buy and download a whole digital audiobook in an instant so you can start listening immediately, and you can multi-task so you can listen on your daily exercise, or while you’re cooking or doing the housework.” It’s striking that a quarter of smart speaker owners have listened to at least one audiobook through their device.Īs to what people have been listening to, Honeyman says that he has seen “a trend towards heavyweight nonfiction, with readers looking to spend their time at home learning about the world around them, with titles such as Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers both regular fixtures in the Audible charts.” “Being read to is a really intimate and comforting thing,” he points out, “a human connection at a time when a lot of people are feeling isolated from one another.” Being read to is a really intimate thing: a human connection at a time when a lot of people are feeling isolated I contacted Duncan Honeyman, senior commissioning editor at Penguin Random House and a key player in the firm’s audiobook strategy and asked him why he felt that audiobooks had done so well during lockdown, particularly given that no one is commuting any more. The report also suggests that audiobooks could be reaching people who had previously eschewed books altogether, but were now devouring this new medium. Audiobook listeners tend to be younger – in their 20s and 30s on average – and it may be that audiobooks are taking market share from ebooks, whose sales have been declining in recent years (Deloitte predicts that audiobook sales are likely to overtake ebooks in the next few years). Britain comes in fourth, accounting for a mere 2% of the global market.ĭeloitte points out that it doesn’t appear that the growth in audiobook sales is at the expense of printed books. Global sales have been growing at 25-30% per annum for the past three years and will hit $3.5bn in 2020, driven by the US and China, which each make up around a third of the market (for comparison, global print book sales are a whopping $145bn per annum). A recent report by Deloitte put some numbers on the phenomenal rise. I was not alone in this – audiobooks have been riding a wave of popularity in the past three years, and it appears that lockdown only intensified our engagement with the spoken word. I’d read all of the novels before – Carry On, Jeeves, A Month in the Country, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ and Cold Comfort Farm – and it was like having old friends with me as I coughed my way towards dawn, both the familiarity of the words and the intimacy of having someone’s voice in my ears a huge comfort at a frightening time. In all, I got through four novels (all repeat listens) and Tom Holland’s Dominion (narrated by Mark Meadows) during my weeks in bed. One of the first things I did when I undertook my own Covid-19 journey in early April – three weeks of coughing and night-sweats in the spare room – was to draw the blinds and put on an audiobook. When I look back on 2020, audiobooks may not be the first thing I remember, but they will occupy a prominent place in the list of crutches that propped me up in this strange and perturbing year.
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