Some audiobooks - especially the classics - are read by famous actors: Nicole Kidman narrates Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” Samuel L. “It’s like being part of the space program in the ’60s,” Luke Daniels, a Michigan-based reader who specializes in science fiction, fantasy and thrillers, told Salon. And while recordings of literature have been around since the 19th century, the audiobook boom is much more recent. The expansion is expected to continue for years to come. Much of the surge of audiobooks is made possible by the streaming technology and ubiquity of smart phones.
Members of its subscription service listen to an average of more than 17 books per year, and membership has increased 40 percent annually.
The dominant company, the Amazon-owned Audible Studios, now offers 250,000 pieces of audio literature. In 2011, she says, about 7,000 audiobooks were released by 2015, releases numbered around 35,000, as publishers put out recordings of new books as well as audiobooks from their back catalogs. “It’s definitely the fastest growing part of the publishing industry these days,” Annie Coreno, reviews editor for Publishers Weekly, told Salon. Many of them are former and working stage actors who talk earnestly about the importance of their characters, their own commitment to the written word and the power of storytelling.Īt the very least, the boom in audiobooks - sales of which increased by 35.3 percent in the first quarter of the year, a period during which sales of hardback books slumped and e-books fell precipitously - shows a rare bit of good news for the publishing world. To them, the arts still have something holy about them. Even in these cynical, ruthlessly pragmatic days, where art has become “content” and many have lost faith in the ability of literature to illuminate our lives, there remains one dogged subculture that believes deeply in the power of the aesthetic.
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