How They Laughed When Spotify Entered Audiobooks. Not Any More
How Spotify Audiobooks transformed from industry laughing stock to award-winning innovator, expanding to 14 markets and proving publishers wrong.
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Category: Audible
The Audible Harry Potter Spectacular: A Landmark Achievement That Defies Replication
Amazon’s lavish Harry Potter audio production showcases audio’s potential but reveals why such scale remains impossible for most publishers to replicate.
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BookBeat reported 21% growth in 2024, reaching $125 million revenue, and topped one million paying users
So pity the PRH authors who missed out on a share of BookBeat’s accumulative royalty payout of SEK 3.5 billion ($320 million) to participating publishers and authors.
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Adapt and Thrive: AI Translation is the Game-Changer’s Game-Changer
Imagine for one moment if, somehow, the Bertelsmann buy-out of Simon & Schuster had been successful and the ever-tuxedoed Count Dohle was still emerging from the grave each night to dictate PRH policy. There would have been no Spotify deal and no unprecedented surge in the fortunes of the audiobook industry.
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Spotify adds Bloomsbury, forces Amazon to add audiobooks to Amazon Music
The kingmaker will be the big publishers, but it will be consumers that that will be the kingmakers’ kingmaker – TNPS 2020.
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Audible’s “first AI-powered search for audiobooks” fuel unfounded fears about the future of human narration
AI narration of audiobooks, while understandably initially perceived as a threat, can actually offer several benefits to human narrators, if they are willing to embrace the opportunity unfolding.
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Seismic shift: Spotify bumps Apple. Rattles Audible. But no, Spotify audiobooks are not free
There is no “free” involved. You pay money and then get a choice of content and...
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Amazon to Consolidate Amazon Studios and MGM Teams Following Layoffs, as 5% of Audible staff are fired
On the bright side, there is no indication that AI is to blame, so the rest of the infotainment industry need lose no sleep conjuring up righteous indignation over the news.
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Non-Readers – the Holy Grail of Publishing
The global market of smartphone-owning non-readers potentially dwarfs the traditional...
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Revenue up, profits down at Audible UK amid record “sales”
If this worrying imbalance between rising revenues and falling profits is also a feature at...
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Amazon’s dismantling of its books operations continues. Book Depository will close this month. What will be next?
Here’s the thing: Publishers have for decades allowed Amazon to so dominate the market that...
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As Spotify audiobooks launches in more à la carte markets, Kobo joins Audible in bucking the industry-imagined all-you-can-eat-is-history trend
Self-fulfilling prophecies are the new black in publishing. You may have heard the one about...
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