The Audiobook Wars are Beginning
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Ihave a confession to make (shareholders in my podcasting business, cover your eyes now): I’m a big audiobook guy.
I am currently, at time of writing, 16 hours into Walter Isaacson’s 20 hour-long biography of Elon Musk. I have already selected my next listens (Michael Lewis’s embedded reporting on the fall of FTX, and a 34-hour murder mystery by an author of increasingly questionable reputation). In my Audible library, I have some 81 titles.
In point of fact, I’ve basically replaced podcasts with audiobooks in my listening habits. I still tune in to the occasional football show (especially if my team, West Ham, have won at the weekend) but generally I listen to, predominantly, long, non-fiction audiobooks. There is no podcast I’ve heard in the past few years that comes close to the pleasure I took from listening to James B. Stewart’s 26-hour opus, DisneyWar.
For me, audiobooks have always been part of a balanced reading diet. I grew up listening to audiobooks — particularly vivid memories of Bernard Cornwall’s Sharpe novels, Alexander McCall Smith’s №1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, and, of course, the Harry Potter books — as part of a voracious reading habit. I have two English degrees (the first, to make it hard to get a decent job; the second, to make it impossible) and was unusual (possibly unique) in my classes as someone who did some of the mandatory reading via audiobook. For my Masters, I contemplated writing my thesis on audiobooks (it made the final three, losing out, in the end, to the literature of post-war housebuilding).
Audiobooks have always seemed like big business to people like me. I grew up begging my mother to take me to Ottaker’s and spend £25 on CDs for my stereo. When Audible arrived on the scene in the 2010s, it was a no-brainer for me. Access to the world’s entire audiobook collections for just a few quid a month? Sign me up. Of course, Audible had been around for longer than that — it was founded in 1995, took an $11m cash injection from Microsoft in 1999, became Apple’s exclusive audiobook provider in 2003, and was bought by Amazon for $300m in 2008. But it was not until the early-to-mid 2010s that the service really hit its stride.
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