Audiobooks are versatile, enriching, transformative and—at times—really fun.
Photo: Reuters (Steve Marcus)
Listen closely
Thomas Edison dreamed of audiobooks.
When Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, he tested his new device by reciting the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” That wasn’t highbrow literature, but Edison felt that the recorded form would lend itself well to full-length books, too—and that some books, perhaps, were meant to be heard rather than seen. “The advantages of such books over those printed are too readily seen to need mention,” Edison wrote in the literary journal North American Review. “Such books would be listened to where now none are read.”
The phonograph, and later the record player, was instrumental in spurring the music industry, but the audiobook business didn’t sprout up until a full century after Edison’s invention.
Now, they’re a billion-dollar industry, a normalized way for readers to consume books, and an unavoidable facet of literary life. In 2022, audiobooks brought in $1.8 billion in the US on the heels of a decade of double-digit revenue growth and corporate investment (not only by major publishers but also tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Spotify.)
So, what can stop audiobooks from becoming the future of reading? Nothing. Audiobooks are versatile, enriching, transformative and—at times—really fun. So leave any prejudice that it’s not real reading at home.
Take a walk, put your headphones in, and listen to something great.
Thomas Edison dreamed of audiobooks.
When Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, he tested his new device by reciting the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” That wasn’t highbrow literature, but Edison felt that the recorded form would lend itself well to full-length books, too—and that some books, perhaps, were meant to be heard rather than seen. “The advantages of such books over those printed are too readily seen to need mention,” Edison wrote in the literary journal North American Review. “Such books would be listened to where now none are read.”
The phonograph, and later the record player, was instrumental in spurring the music industry, but the audiobook business didn’t sprout up until a full century after Edison’s invention.
Now, they’re a billion-dollar industry, a normalized way for readers to consume books, and an unavoidable facet of literary life. In 2022, audiobooks brought in $1.8 billion in the US on the heels of a decade of double-digit revenue growth and corporate investment (not only by major publishers but also tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Spotify.)
So, what can stop audiobooks from becoming the future of reading? Nothing. Audiobooks are versatile, enriching, transformative and—at times—really fun. So leave any prejudice that it’s not real reading at home.
Take a walk, put your headphones in, and listen to something great.
By the digits
$5.3 billion: Global revenue for audiobooks in 2022
$35 billion: Projected global revenue for audiobooks in 2030
57%: Share of audiobook listeners between the ages of 18 and 44
49%: Share of the US population that is between the ages of 18 and 44
0.60-3.00x: Playback speed range in the Libby app
100: Books you can read in a year if you want, especially if you embrace formats like audiobooks
Origin story
A driving ambition
In 1975, Duvall Hecht was frustrated and bored by his long daily commutes between his home in Newport Beach, Calif., and his investment banking job in Los Angeles.
Hecht, a former Olympic gold medalist in rowing, found what we could call early audiobooks: recordings of books made for blind people. He popped the recordings into a reel-to-reel tape recorder placed on his passenger seat, but quickly exhausted his supply.
He figured he’d just record his own on cassette. He started with nonfiction—George Plimpton’s football tale Paper Lion, which became the first of a massive catalog produced by his new company, Books on Tape.
Books on Tape became a household name and a pioneer of the form. Hecht sold his company—and its catalog of 6,000 tapes—to publisher Random House for $20 million in 2001.
A driving ambition
In 1975, Duvall Hecht was frustrated and bored by his long daily commutes between his home in Newport Beach, Calif., and his investment banking job in Los Angeles.
Hecht, a former Olympic gold medalist in rowing, found what we could call early audiobooks: recordings of books made for blind people. He popped the recordings into a reel-to-reel tape recorder placed on his passenger seat, but quickly exhausted his supply.
He figured he’d just record his own on cassette. He started with nonfiction—George Plimpton’s football tale Paper Lion, which became the first of a massive catalog produced by his new company, Books on Tape.
Books on Tape became a household name and a pioneer of the form. Hecht sold his company—and its catalog of 6,000 tapes—to publisher Random House for $20 million in 2001.
Read how you want to read
One of the biggest annoyances for any audiobook reader is the constant insinuation—by, well, haters—that listening to audiobooks doesn’t “count” as reading.
In fact, we’ve been hardwired through the ages to read aloud—and to listen when others read aloud to us. In Saint Augustine’s Confessions (published around 400 CE), he remarked how strange it was that Saint Ambrose read silently to himself. So, what’s with the snobbishness around audiobooks? Is it something about the way we understand the words being conveyed?
Unfortunately, there isn’t robust academic research into reader comprehension of audiobooks as compared to print books, though numerous studies show that audiobooks are a boon to new language learners (pdf), struggling visual readers (pdf), and younger readers.