There was an inevitable backlash from some in the traditional media about those initial reports. How did you view that commentary? I viewed the initial backlash as both validation and opportunit. It validated the idea that the opaque digital marketplace had become a significant industry pain point, which existing providers of data were unable to address. It also created the opportunit for dialogue with the traditional industry’s savviest and most knowledgeable market analysts. It oſten led to our drilling down into the numbers together, and jointly coming to understand our industry in a more nuanced way.


Many of the highest-profile industry analysts who were vocal critics early on have become friends and colleagues with whom I consult to pool our combined knowledge of the market, or to co-author blog posts or collaborate on in-depth analyses.


You’ve been largely vindicated, and despite reports of a softening of e-book sales, Amazon continues to grow its e-book business. Why did it take so long for the industry to ‘get it’? Private recognition of our data’s basic accuracy by key industry players came much earlier than any public acknowledgement. For the past few years, I’ve been doing a fair amount of consulting work for publishers, distributors, private equit investors in the publishing space and the like, helping them answer questions about the digital and online sides of the book market that existing industry data couldn’t.


The largest publishers actually “got it” relatively quickly. Behind the scenes, they’ve been adapting to the opportunities and risks inherent in e-books by seeking out new, external sources of data, or building up their own internal market-tracking efforts for digital, to fill in the gaps leſt by the traditional data sources’ inabilit to cover a huge part of the market. Big publishers also see no real business benefit in publicly advertising a shrinking digital market share, especially when it’s a considered and deliberate strategic trade-off made to avoid cannibalising their print sales. Conversely, a lot of the trade press, as well as midsize and smaller publishers, took much longer to “get” what was actually happening in the market. In retrospect, that isn’t all that surprising. Lacking the whole-market data they needed, and not having the resources to build out their own tracking solutions, smaller players could only work with the industry data they could get: mainly self-reported e-book sales from a handful of the very largest publishers. That limited data set told a consist- ent (but without context, highly incomplete)


TheBookseller.com


Exclusive Audiobook data


Listen Up: audio market set to grow as research backs Audible’s captions


Philip Jones @philipdsjones I


nitial research from Harris Interactive suggests that there may be a growing market for those who both read and listen


to books, partially vindicating Audible’s efforts to introduce a facility whereby listeners can also read along with text of the audio. The full exclusive research, commissioned by The Bookseller, is to be unveiled at the FutureBook Conference on 25th November, and also shows that the market for audio could yet experience further strong growth. Harris says that it found that a quarter of


audiobook readers listen to an audiobook and read a print version of a book at the same time, with the behaviour heavily weighted to 18 to 54-year-olds, and twice as common among men as women. According to Lee Langford, research director, the numbers suggest that there is a market for captions (irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the legal battle, more of which below), and that this behaviour is likely to increase over time with younger people driving it. Audible had been slated to release its new


captions feature in the US in September, enabling people to read along to their audio- books with text generated by computer, not gleaned from the original book. But the initia- tive has since become bogged down in a legal dispute between the audiobook retailer and US publishers, who argue that it is an infringe- ment of their copyright. The Harris research also found that


audiobook reach has so far been significantly higher in ABC1 households (roughly defined as upper-middle, middle or lower-middle class) particularly those with children living at home, and there has been greater take-up generally among younger people (18 to 34-year-olds). It also found the audiobook market was


likely to grow significantly, with only 23% of the non-readers ruling out trying audiobooks in future, and any resistance was largely down to a preference for the physical experience of a print book and the belief that readers take in more and get more involved in a story when it is in print. According to Harris, in the past 12 months


consumption has doubled from an average of two audiobooks per listener per annum to


Any resistance [to audio] was largely down to a preference for the physical experience of a print book and the belief that readers take in more from print


Users also reach for audiobooks when


they need to relax (easily the leading reason why they do so), or when cooking a meal and commuting. The data also found that 57% of audiobook listeners agree that they never have time to sit down and read a physical book, and the same proportion feel that listening to an audiobook is a more immersive and intimate experience than reading a physical book. While smartphones are easily the most


popular device for listening to audiobooks (60%), one in five now also do so through a smart speaker.


About the data


The research was conducted online among a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 UK book readers between 8th–9th October 2019. Lee Langford will unveil the full findings of the research at the 11 a.m. session, Generation headphone: who is consuming audio and what are they listening to?, alongside Paul Abbassi, founder of Bookstat, and Susie Warhurst, senior vice- president of content at podcast platform Acast.


05


four audiobooks. It also claims half of current listeners had not listened to any audiobook as recently as two years ago. Audiobooks fulfil two key purposes: to help


people relax or unwind after a stressful day and to entertain—the latter as an alternative to TV and radio, particularly for older listeners. Interestingly, half of audiobook listeners said that they spend less time on social media since they started listening to audiobooks. Other, more common reasons why people listen to audiobooks are to stimulate their brain (particularly men), to broaden knowledge of a particular topic, and around a third listen to help them get to sleep at night.


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