![]() When Benjamin Zephaniah reads a poem called Blue Bell, the recording under that is a bluebell wood in Thorpeness in the middle of a rainstorm.” “We captured original wild track recordings out in the British countryside, and built a soundscape that goes under each poem. Such a visual work wasn’t an obvious choice to transfer to audiobook, but Penguin commissioned sound recordist Chris Watson, who has worked with David Attenborough. He points to Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris’s book The Lost Words, a beautifully illustrated collection of poems based on words that have disappeared from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Lennon says there are now books being recorded that would never have been considered as audiobooks 10 years ago. The really exciting audience for me is people for whom reading and books are not fundamentally part of their lives.” Or it’s an alternative to TV for people who are conscious of their screen time. “It’s people who are either fitting books and authors into their day in new ways, so people who might be existing readers but have found that during their commute or exercising or cooking dinner, there’s an opportunity to listen. “Often audio is not competing with time spent with books,” says Richard Lennon, publisher at Penguin Audio. ![]() There is much debate about whether listening to a book is the same as reading it, but perhaps that misses the point. “This is not an age group that is traditionally a strong book-buying group.” A study by The Publisher’s Association found 54 per cent of UK audiobook buyers listen to them for their convenience, while 41 per cent choose the format because it allows them to consume books when reading print isn’t possible. Laurence Howell, content director at Audible – the Amazon-owned audiobook platform – says they’ve also seen big growth in the 18-to-24 age group. Research by Nielsen Book found downloads of audiobooks in the UK were particularly high among urban-dwelling males aged 25 to 44. In fact, audio is pulling in new audiences – whether that’s listeners who don’t usually buy books, or readers listening to genres in audio format that they wouldn’t pick up in print. ![]() While audiobook sales are up and physical book sales down, it’s not a given that the two things are related. With audiobooks, there’s a feeling that it’s an additive.” “Nobody is running scared from it, in comparison to the similar moment for ebooks where there was that fear that they were cannibalising other formats in the book world. “It’s the blue-eyed boy of publishing at the moment,” explains Fionnuala Barrett, editorial director of Audio at Harper Collins. Some authors are even skipping print and writing exclusive audio content.įor the publishing industry, which has faced its fair share of gloomy news stories over the past two decades, the boom in audio is widely regarded as good news. There are hugely ambitious productions using ensemble casts (the audio of George Saunders’ Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo features 166 different narrators), specially created soundscapes and technological advances such as surround-sound 3D audio. Now audiobooks draw A-list talent – think Elisabeth Moss reading The Handmaid’s Tale, Meryl Streep narrating Charlotte’s Web or Michelle Obama reading all 19 hours of her own memoir, Becoming. Gone are the days of dusty cassette box-sets and stuffily-read versions of the classics. Compared with physical book sales, audio is the baby of the publishing world, but it is growing up fast. Fast forward nearly 150 years, and he’d be pretty impressed to find more than 400,000 audiobooks available to download straight into his pocket.Īudiobooks are in the midst of a boom, with Deloitte predicting that the global market will grow by 25 per cent in 2020 to US$3.5 billion (£2.6 billion). Its fleece was white as snow.” As he created the first ever audio of the spoken word, Edison dreamed that the technology might one day allow a whole novel to be recorded. Leaning over his new machine one day he recited the words: “Mary had a little lamb. Back in 1878, shortly after he had invented the phonograph, Thomas Edison hit upon an idea.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |