Audio book publishers get in tune with iPods
Fastest growth is coming from books that are downloaded to portable music players and computers.
Surveys show young people are moving away from buying CDs and tapes, opting instead for audio books and music they can download.
Audio books used to be a market dominated by people aged 45 to 60. But the average age of purchasers has fallen dramatically to one in which the 30-something iPod generation accounts for the majority of sales.
Two new audio book sites just launched by Spoken Network in Britain (spoken-network.co.uk and spoken-network.com) are initially offering 5,000 titles — from comedy shows such as Dad’s Army and Blackadder to classics by Emily Bronte and Thomas Hardy.
For those who want to move from music to some of the world’s greatest wordsmiths, there’s Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet.
Four works mark Samuel Beckett’s centenary, while Irish actor Jim Norton narrates the short stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners.
Given the age profile of the new addicts to audio books, it comes as no surprise that the classics don’t feature high up on the bestsellers list.
The Ricky Gervais Show holds the first two slots on the all-time top sellers published by Audible, the British audio book and podcasting company.
In third place is Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Everything.
Downloading is simple, quick and cheaper than the physical book or CD.
Privacy is also assured, as nobody needs to know what’s going on in the space between your ears.
It may help to explain why a self-help classic, first published in 1936, is making an audio comeback.
How To Win Friends and Influence People is 12th on Audible’s all-time bestsellers.
Head of Audible’s British business Chris McKee said a lot of people might not want to openly display that they were reading a book on self-improvement.
“But if you download it on your iPod, no one knows what you are listening to,” he explained.
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