Straight-to-Audio Books is a Rising Art Form

March 18, 2015

Given the comeback of oral storytelling on platforms like National Public Radio (NPR) (think: Serial, the true-crime saga released this past October), companies like Audible are calling for “straight-to-audio” books. These audiobooks won’t be printed at all.

Audiobooks, which back in the early ’90s were just beginning to become part of our popular culture, are now a $1 billion dollar industry, with more than 35,000 titles published in 2013 alone. Robin Whitten, editor and founder of Audiofile magazine, said to NPR that audiobooks really took off with the introduction of new listening devices.

“You suddenly have a complete recorded file from the first words of a book to the end,” she said. “And you’re not fumbling around looking for disc four in the middle of some really important scene. And that made a big difference; it made audiobooks much more user-friendly.”

But what has been key to the success of audiobooks these days is the signing on of celebrities as narrators. Such actors as Anne Hathaway, Colin Firth, and Nicole Kidman have brought notoriety to audiobooks by Audible, which is owned by Amazon; Jake Gyllenhall’s narration of The Great Gatsby made it a bestseller.

“Many...[customers] buy based on the narrator,” said CEO Don Katz. “They’ll literally listen to anything a specific actor reads simply because they like their styles.”

Philip Pullman, perhaps known best for his triology, His Dark Materials, “loves” the idea of placing a greater precedence on oral storytelling. “I love this... We are taking part in a little ritual or habit that goes back thousands and thousands and thousands of years—before the first mark was ever made on a stone or tablet. Long before writing, people were telling each other stories and the audiobook goes all the way back to that tradition.”

Audible has thirty audio works in the pipeline including The Starling Project, written originally by thriller writer Jeffrey Deaver and starring Alfred Molina.


No Comments