Are you a good listener? More and more people consider themselves to be, and the evidence is impressive: according to the Audio Publishers Association (APA), audiobook sales grew 22.7% with over 46,000 audiobooks published in 2017, and podcasts now total more than 500,000, up from 150,000 last year. According to eMarketer, 73 million people in the US will tune in at least monthly, and 52% listen to four or more podcasts a week.
But we only have two ears and a limited amount of time to juggle our TV-watching, social media posting, and reading – so what wins in the aural battle?
Audiobook publishers interviewed for this article agree that, if a battle is brewing, it’s not between podcasts and audiobooks. Macmillan Audio President and Publisher Mary Beth Roche believes podcasts have helped develop the audiobook audience, especially among younger readers, as listeners are “reintroduced to the spoken word.” And though they have separate business models, the formats overlap – e.g. Courtney Summers’ Sadie, which integrates a character’s podcast into the audiobook, or Welcome to Night Vale, which started as a podcast and became a book – and are often complementary, as when Macmillan released the Time To Parent audiobook and podcast show in the same week. Increasingly, publishers use podcasts to promote an author’s audiobook and audiobooks advertise on popular podcasts, with Audible in the top ten list of advertisers.
How to listen
Usually, comparisons between audiobooks and podcasts focus on whether fans of one are likely to be fans of – or converts to – the other. But, as smart speakers like Alexa, Google Home, and Apple Homepod become more ubiquitous, listeners of either will have more options to hear both: two of the top three daily smart speaker requests from nine pm to midnight are short stories or audiobooks, and 49% of podcasts are listened to at home. Also, a whopping 74% of the smart speaker owners who listen to podcasts do so directly from the device, not through their mobile apps.
Smart speakers, also referred to as voice-first devices, are seen by many as a boon to the audiobook industry. “Everyone who has a smart speaker has an audiobookstore in their home,” says Penguin Random House Audio President Amanda D’Acierno. With more sophisticated syncing now available, consumers can purchase audiobooks on a phone, computer or smart speaker and then read on all those platforms wherever they left off. The same is not yet true with podcasts, because at the moment it depends on which mobile apps are compatible with the smart speaker, though interoperability will undoubtedly expand.
Where to listen
Thanks to the proliferation of iOS and Android apps for podcasts and audiobooks, phones and mobile devices are a favorite for consumer listening. These apps can be synced to the car radio, but the percentage of people who listen while driving has dwindled to just 22% – though that number is increasing with the production of new cars with streaming audio and podcasting integration included. The big upswing, instead, is in-home listening.
Bradley Metrock, CEO of Score Publishing and executive producer of Digital Book World (DBW), is an evangelist for this emerging technology. (Score Publishing owns VoiceFirst.fm, and Metrock hosts its popular podcast This Week In Voice.) He believes that “all boats have risen on the rising tide of Alexa,” and that, through audiobooks, podcasts, and voice assistants, “voice-first is the future of book discoverability.” For instance, he thinks readers will soon be able to say, “Siri, you know what I’ve read – what’s next?” His company is hosting the third Alexa conference for developers in January, and his podcasts already offer discussions of all voice technologies. Participants often cite Google in particular as the company to watch in this arena: it launched Google Podcasts earlier this year, along with adding audiobooks to its Google Play Bookstore. These choices increase opportunities for discovery in both mediums, especially with AI-powered recommendations based on your listening patterns.
Libraries still remain major drivers for audiobook consumption as well. According to the APA, 52% of listeners said borrowing from a library or library website was instrumental to their listening habit, 43% said they downloaded an audiobook from a library, and 14% said they most often use the library for their digital listening. Fiction, specifically genres like mystery and thrillers, are top categories.
What to listen to
Though few stats are available about listeners of both podcasts and audiobooks, there are numerous podcasts about books and audiobooks, from the NYTBR to Overdrive’s Professional Book Nerds and Audiofile’s Behind the Mic. Brightly, a website for parents that launched in 2014 with PRH, has a list of age-appropriate podcasts about books.
Meanwhile, children’s audio shows itself to be a potentially big market. NPR has developed But Why: A Podcast for Curious Kids, and Gimlet has the popular Story Pirates. Audiobooks have been around since the days of records and cassettes, but now both Google and Alexa are expanding their utility: they have developed stories that parents or children can request be read to them, and publishers are creating their own capabilities, or, in smart speaker parlance, skills (Alexa) and actions (Google). Audible offers a range of titles in multiple languages, many whispersynced. Developers like NovelEffect provide theme music and sound effects that are synced to a specific book. And major companies like Disney have also been experimenting with this technology on Google Home.
BookBub’s entry into the discounted audiobook market is also worth noting. Its recently-launched Chirp, primarily stocked with backlist from HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, enables listeners to download a free app and stream audiobooks on any Bluetooth-enabled smart speaker using the phone or tablet’s Bluetooth connection. Prices generally range from $1.99 to $4.99.
What’s next
The lines are already blurring: while podcasts take advertising and audiobooks don’t, on-demand internet radio platforms like Stitcher Premium offer podcasts either as ad-free paid subscriptions or as ad-supported exclusive podcasts available only to Stitcher Premium subscribers. Case Closed, a true crime podcast which will be published as an audiobook after its run, is exclusive with Stitcher for six months. Meanwhile, Podglomerate CEO Jeff Umbro, who also hosts a podcast called Writers Who Don’t Write, believes advertising may become more common in audiobooks – though an ad-supported platform with free audiobooks is a possible scenario as well.
Podcasts are generally under an hour long and sometimes as short as ten minutes, whether they’re news updates, political rants, interviews, serial fiction, etc. Audiobooks, other than those for kids, are often eight or more hours long, take weeks to create, and, until recently, had limited distribution options because of their file sizes. As a result, Audible, iTunes, and Overdrive have dominated distribution to subscribers and library patrons, with Libro.fm more recently providing an option for indie stores as well. But Google Home, Alexa, Apple HomePod and, soon, Samsung Galaxy are making some of those issues less obvious, in turn making listening much easier. Now audiobooks can be called up and seamlessly streamed from the devices without listeners needing to rely on their mobile apps. (In theory audiobooks are now available on the Apple watch, but users complain that it’s not yet a turnkey solution.)
Regardless of the output device, though, audiobooks and podcasts still face hurdles. The former require a “huge amount of work” to make them accessible and available to the reader, says Macmillan’s Roche; podcasts, with no book to help create a market for them, require time to build an audience and attract advertisers. A sign of how crowded the market is getting came with news that BuzzFeed and Slate have recently trimmed back their offerings (though Slate’s Panoply continues on as a podcast network), and Audible reorganized its podcast team this summer to focus more on original material for its subscribers. Author and podcaster Gretchen Rubin warned at a recent Women’s Media Group (WMG) talk that, if authors create podcasts to support their book, they should be prepared to stick with it beyond a few episodes. Her own weekly podcast, Happier, was started in 2015 with her sister Elizabeth Craft, and has been downloaded 40 million times. In her recent New Yorker article on the evolution of podcasts, Rebecca Mead notes that, since its début in 2014, the first season of Serial has been downloaded two hundred and forty million times.
As more companies decide that audiobooks and podcasts are the holy grail, there’s a danger that the two forms will clutter their own industry and cannibalize the other. But, as the Podglomerate’s Jeff Umbro says, there’s plenty of upside still to come.“There are enough big players putting their money and resources into audio,” he says. “They wouldn’t be there if it weren’t working.”
Stats whose source is not otherwise identified come from Edison Research.
