RBmedia announces “record-breaking growth.” RBMedia’s Audiobooks.com app exceeds 2 million downloads and 14 million hours of listening

RBmedia, owned by KKR, the hedge-fund management team in the process of acquiring RBMedia’s bigger competitor, OverDrive, claims to be the largest publisher of audiobooks in the world, releasing 6,500 new titles in 2019.

The RBMedia press release adds,

The company launched its new politics and policy imprint, Kalorama Audio. RBmedia also announced exclusive partnerships with Harvard Business Review Press, Princeton University Press, and Baen Books to publish a combined 400+ audiobooks over the next three years across its various content brands.

Refer to the press release for more details on partner achievements. Here to focus on the RBDigital library platform, which saw a 52% increase in titles borrowed and a 28% increase in app installs.

Key RBdigital product enhancements in 2019 included the release of an industry-leading accessibility solution with support for the latest industry standard WCAG 2.1, a new graphical reporting dashboard, an improved recommendation engine, and partner integrations with Polaris, Evergreen and Koha. The content selection was significantly enhanced, and the total number of content types available on the RBdigital platform is now at an industry-leading 15. Additionally, the company launched digital content collections for higher education institutions and corporations.

RBMedia’s D2C arm Audiobooks.com added 40,000 new titles and had more than 14 million hours of audiobooks consumption in 2019.

Further, Audiobooks.com,

expanded its audio-entertainment offering by integrating podcasts into the app—providing members over 896,000 podcasts and over 59 million episodes. Additional releases included a comprehensive membership VIP Rewards program and personalized in-app member community features, as well as strategic integration with Waze—extending its catalog reach by offering seamless in-car access to up to 50 million Waze users.

Based in Maryland, USA, RBMedia content brands include: Recorded Books, Tantor Media, HighBridge, Kalorama Audio, ChristianAudio, Gildan Media, W. F. Howes in the United Kingdom, and Wavesound in Australia.