Whether you’ve been privy to it or not, there has been a boom in the consumption of audiobooks in the past few years. I produce them for publishers including Audible, Harper Collins, Pan Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Orion, and I see a lot of the good (and bad) literature that gets made into something you can download and listen to. This increase in consumption is something of a marvel, even to those of us present in the studio at the time of recording. We’re not complaining, or even doubting its legitimacy, but there’s a lot of asking, “Why?”
Instead of standing at the coffee machine and mulling it over with actors, publishers and studio managers as I often do, I wanted to give it some proper thought.
Instead of standing at the coffee machine and mulling it over with actors, publishers and studio managers as I often do, I wanted to give it some proper thought.
My first impulse was that this boost in interest is in tandem with our love affair with having everything immediately available on a smartphone. YouTube, TV, music, films, social media, the news, e-books, podcasts…audiobooks? It is deeply entrenched in humans to crave stories, and to love storytelling, and this technology has simply made satisfying that craving more readily available.
Okay, but isn’t the paperback book just as good at serving that purpose? You might argue, hasn’t it been so for decades?
I love the paperback book and it is my preferred way of consuming literature. But the practicality of it is limited. Doubtless there’s an excellent study somewhere about how people’s commuting behaviours have changed in recent years, but here are some brief notes from my own observations: due to economic challenges, we typically live further from work, and spend more time in cars and on trains. Whether you’re walking to work, or moving between buses and changing trains, continuous reading is impossible. So what if the book can walk and change trains with you? What if you can stick something in your ears to seamlessly take you out of the sardine crush, away from someone’s Weetabix breath, and even further from the drunk man trying to start a conversation? This is where the audiobook has the edge.
But I think it goes deeper than that, still.
Podcasts have served to make listening to audio content trendy. My generation talk about podcasts with the same fervour with which we’d talk about a TV show. With friends, we recommend podcasts to each other, and it’s nice to catch up on where we’ve got to. There’s a lovely sense of community to the voices you’ve listened to, then talked with each other about. Whereas reading can be such a personal experience - your own voice in your head, and your own particular journey into your mind’s eye - a narrator lifts the story to a shared experience, thereby replicating this sense of community. Likewise, when I read essays, memoirs and autobiographies now, I want to be listening to an audio version, and hear it from them, and feel like I’m part of a wider conversation.
(Producer hat on: I only approve of author-reads if the author can read their own work in an engaging way, and the recording is clean.)
We crave content, crave entertainment, crave distraction from the drudgery of routine, even more so now that we’re increasingly used to having information at our fingertips. Audio content feels like a low-key, low-risk solution to that. There’s something about it that feels like down-time, feels like mindfulness, and I love the multi-tasking pretence of lying under a blanket with my eyes closed, still able to consume something I want to be reading.
However, I think the practical benefits of audiobooks are by the by. Music, the radio and indeed podcasts can easily and equally take us from home to work and to a cosy space under a blanket. No problem. So I wonder if the main point that is driving this boom really is that deep, very human yearning for good storytelling, and that desire for a sense of community. Technological advances have made that instantly accessible.
The world today is a dark and scary place; how very special, how very soothing, to unplug and plug in and have the human voice tell you a story. To have it all in the palm of your ears, so to speak, while to world outside rages.
