“In terms of what the publishing industry is putting into audio now, it’s not just more content, but a much broader range,” says Lennon. Benedict Cumberbatch narrated The Order of Time in 2018 Benedict Cumberbatch, for example, was hired by Penguin Random House in 2018 to narrate Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, a book covering subjects including loop quantum gravity and thermodynamics. “There are more entrants every day into this space.”įor the world’s biggest publishers, that appetite increasingly means no book is off limits, regardless of genre or complexity. “It’s a very, very vibrant market,” says Aurelie de Troyer, senior vice-president of international English content at Audible. Thousands of AI-narrated books are now available on Google Play Books and Apple Books, allowing smaller publishers and authors to have their book read more cheaply.Īudible does not offer an AI service, but is keeping an eye on the competition emerging in the industry. “It’s a book that you don’t need to have in your hands in order to read and that allows you to have access to a book in environments and whilst doing other things that would have once precluded it.”Īpple and Google have even begun to offer authors the chance to use AI narrators, in which a digital voice that sounds almost as good as a human will read their book. “You can now have a library of books on your phone that you can listen to while you’re running or while you’re cooking dinner”, says Richard Lennon, audio publisher at Penguin Random House. People could listen on a dog walk, while doing household chores, or commuting into work. Audiobooks were suddenly both cheaper and freed from the restrictions of a long car journey or an afternoon at home. Smartphones and user-friendly digital platforms such as Audible changed all that. “People would dismiss them, saying, ‘Oh, audiobooks are for the blind,’” says Willow Nash, who has recorded hundreds of audiobooks in her career, including by authors such as Jill Mansell, M. There was even a certain snobbery around the format. Cassette tapes holding abridged versions of literary classics, children’s stories or the latest crime novel sat in corners of bookshops, rarely generating much publicity. Aside from outliers like Harry Potter, audiobooks were largely ignored by much of the books trade for many years. Louis Theroux recorded his audiobook for one week While Audible, owned by Amazon, remains the biggest audiobook platform, Spotify launched its own service last year, offering more than 300,000 titles, and calling it a “massive opportunity” for the company.

That demand is leading many of the world’s tech giants to invest heavily in the industry. Around 27 million audiobooks were purchased in the UK last year, according to the retail sales monitoring service Nielsen – more than four times as many as were sold just a decade ago.

Oliver twist illustrated