The Bookseller.com

29th August 2008

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Loud and clear

10.07.08 Tom Tivnan

The first industry-wide audiobooks promotion is currently under way.  The Bookseller talks to a group of audiobook movers and shakers to find out the impact it is making, and what the future of the sector holds.

If ever the trade had the chance to “sex up” the audiobook market it is now. An industry-wide promotion, run by the Audiobook Publishers Association (APA) and the Book Marketing Society in association with the Guardian, has boosted the sector’s profile. The 40 Best Audiobooks campaign has featured unprecedented high street participation, free downloads through Audible.co.uk and an online audiobooks literary festival.

The timing for the promotion may be apt, with the market showing signs of gaining momentum. The APA is not releasing its 2006/07 figures, partly owing to one major publisher not reporting its audiobook sales, but 2005/06 data shows total invoice sales at £71.4m, a 4% rise on the previous year. APA administrator Charlotte McCandlish says: “The sector is unquestionably up from the previous year, not by a huge amount, but more units are definitely being sold.”

Yet a number of issues face the sector, such as whether the use of anti-copying digital rights management (DRM) software helps or hinders the market, and if Amazon’s acquisition of Audible will squeeze out online competition. Below, we ask a selection of audio publishers about current challenges and the future of audiobooks.

Jan Paterson
Publishing Director, BBC Audiobooks
“Digital gives us global reach”

Are you pleased with the promotion?: We are over the moon with the Top 40 promotion. We’ve been delighted with the response from high street retail to digital download [specialists]. Everyone has pulled together to make this a highly visible and strong promotion.
 
DRM v non-DRM:
We believe that eventually the whole market will move to a DRM-free position.  An analogy for the consumer experience with DRM is that it is like buying a CD, but finding you can only play it on your machine in the kit­chen but not on your CD player in the car.  Listeners, having paid a reasonable price for the use of the intellectual property, expect to be able to play it where they want.  We have found from feedback from our customers that they find the restrictions in­herent with DRM a barrier to buying downloads.
 
Audible and Amazon merger:
The link to Amazon is a great opportunity for the industry: there is now the opportunity to get awareness of the audio format out of the audio section and into the mainstream.
 
The future:
Optimistic. Digital gives us global reach, and it shows we are seeing sales of downloads all over the world and in some surprising places as well. I think what a lot of people are doing is “side-loading” from a CD to their MP3 player—this way they have ensured that they have the security of the physical recording, but the convenience of the MP3 ­format.

Chris McKee,
m.d., Audible UK
“We are a niche within a niche”

Promotion:
It has been great. I think this is the first time that a number of different providers have pulled together to market the sector. More needs to be done to promote the industry as a whole, though, and I would love to see more promotions.

DRM v non-DRM:
We created a ­tailor-made format for a good audiobook user experience, including being able to bookmark and fast forward quickly through files. In designing that we happened to put DRM around it, because we thought it was the right thing to do. We are not aware of any negative feedback about Audible DRM. With it you can transfer files between your devices and if something happens to your file you can download it again within a year. It is a very benign DRM. MP3s can be a bad audiobook experience. This is not a three-minute song we are talking about. For a 15-hour unabridged audiobook, you could be potentially downloading 250 MP3 files. Who wants to wade through that?

Amazon and Audible:
We are focused on creating a great user experience, delivering great service, with the widest possible choice. So what is wrong with that? You have to remember that audio downloads are 10% of the audiobook market. So we are a niche within a niche.

Future:
One of the things that APA research has uncovered is that 37% of people prefer unabridged audio­books and I think that will grow. Part of the problem with unabridged is that audio is partly still stuck in the physical world and limited by retailers shelf space. With downloads that is obviously not a concern.

Nicolas Soames
Publisher, Naxos Audiobooks 
“Battle ground is between commercial and free content providers”

Promotion:
Choosing the Guardian as a partner was astute­­—it has always supported audiobooks.

DRM v non-DRM:
I have long been an advocate of MP3s and non-DRM as a way to drive the market. It is definitely happening [the move to non-DRM] and we are seeing more retailers and websites moving to MP3s. It is irrevocable, I think. We have seen a rise in downloads in recent months, but interestingly, also a rise in CD sales.

Amazon and Audible:
It is of major interest to see what will really start to happen when Amazon and Audible start working as one major player with such a major piece of the market; it could be what the industry needs or it could be very concerning. It is interesting to look at what Amazon moving into music downloads has done: it hasn’t dented iTunes’ business much. This might mean that the Amazon customer profile is a mail order rather than download.

Future:
The audiobook market can only rise and rise. If you look on the train in the morning you see more and more people listening to their iPods and Zunes, not reading a book. However, the difficulty is that there is so much stuff out there that is available for free. Will people go to the BBC website and download “Front Row” for free and listen to that on the way to work, or will they purchase an audiobook? The battle ground is going to be between the commercial and free providers of content.

David Roth-Ey
Director of audio and e-books, HarperCollins 
“Audio is a long tail product”

Promotion:
It is good to see. The UK gave birth to spoken word recordings and it is sad to see it lagging behind. Coming from the US, it is wonderful to see the wide range of free quality audio content available here, but as publishers we need a way to shout about our own offers.

DRM v non-DRM:
The landscape may change, but for now we are still a pro-DRM audio publisher.

Audible and Amazon:
We see growth in both Amazon and Audible. The great thing about them is that are able to offer the breadth of the list. Audio is a long-tail product­—we have, for example, 80-plus Agatha Christie titles that continue to sell well. It can be very, very difficult for stores to have this range because they simply don’t have the space.

Future:
I think there will be a shift for trade publishers to producing unabridged audio. Right now, we focus on abridged because of shelf space in store and price points. But digitally, space does not matter and the pricing is much better.

Ali Muirden,
Publisher, Macmillan Digital Audio, and chair of the APA
“This is a growing, vibrant sector”

Promotion:
It is a really positive step forward. We have tried to get industry-wide promotions going in the past and they have kind of ground to a halt. The important thing is that it will raise awareness for the audiobooks market as a whole, and hopefully will lead to increased sales. I have been really pleased with how the trade has responded, they all came on board quickly, and no one has been difficult.

DRM v non-DRM:
I can see both sides of the argument. For the moment, Macmillan is sticking with DRM. There has been a lot of experimentation in the US with non-DRM and MP3s and we have looked at that closely and it seems that piracy has not been an issue.

Amazon and Audible:
Audible is great and has been doing some fabulous stuff, and the exclusive arrangement with iTunes gives them an advantage. But it is never good if there is just one retailer, and we could use a few more people in the sector. Other companies will step in because they can see this is a growing, vibrant sector.

Future:
What is going to be exciting is what is going to happen in the mobile market. A lot more mobile companies are developing technology where audiobooks can download in a matter of minutes rather than hours. We will also begin to see more English language audio content being downloaded to mobiles in markets such as India, China and Japan. Costs used to be a problem there, particularly in India, but we see a number of companies which are opening up access.

Simon Petherick
Pulisher, Beautiful Books 
“The CD will disappear in 18 months”

Promotion:
When we launch Beautiful Sounds on 24th July, we are not going to having a physical product. The death knell for the CD has already been sounded last month, when Woolworths stopping selling CD singles, and I think the CD will largely disappear in 18 months. With starting a new business, we thought “why bother with old technology?” That said, we are keen to work with retailers­ through websites such as Waterstones.com and ­Borders.com.

DRM V non-DRM:
DRM just screws up too many ­people’s com­puters. Piracy is, of course, increasing, but so are the number of legal downloads and non-DRM just opens the market. It is like Louis Vuitton having to live with tknock-off, pirated luggage. In a weird way it actually increases the exposure of the product. I don’t underestimate piracy; it is a crime, but we have to live with it.

Audible and Amazon:
I think it is quite encouraging when a business gets successful and grows—but it also slows them down. This is a long-distance race not a sprint and it will be interesting to see if they can keep up the energy.

Future:
There is no doubt that audio will grow enormously over the next few years and that growth will almost exclusively be through mobile phones. With print and digital the nature of the book is changing and we should start looking at it as intellectual property.

Clive Stanhope
M.d., CSA Word 
“It is inevitable that DRM  is going”

Promotion:
I was very pleased and I just hope the momentum can keep going for the entire six weeks.

DRM v non-DRM:
My view has always been that DRM should be kept because of the copyright issues involved. That said, I think it is inevitable that DRM is going to go and can’t be maintained. I can remember when we were worried about illegal copying with cassette tapes. It is a bit like that. You are always going to get people who rip you off, but it is a small amount.

Audible and Amazon:
We are always concerned with domination by a big conglomerate, that’s why we remain a nimble independent company. It’s very early days, but if Amazon comes into the field further in terms of downloads, and help to promote audiobooks, then that can only be a good thing.

Future:
I used to be against downloads because I thought it would ultimately be bad for the market. If you take customers away from the physical product, then there is no reason for the shops to stock CDs and you lose visibility. But look at what’s happening in America. There has been a whole new crop of ­people coming into audiobooks through downloads and CD sales have actually increased over the past two years as downloads have increased.

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