Over the last five years, the popularity of audiobooks has been on a consistent upward trend: BookNet research suggests that the percentage of Canadian readers who prefer audiobooks over other formats increased from 8% in 2020 to 16% in 2025. We brought together a panel of professionals from different corners of the industry to talk about what’s behind this increase, how they champion audiobooks, what opportunities and challenges they face, how the industry could look in the future as technology evolves, and much more.
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Further reading
Make America read again by Brian Bannon
Messaging the E-books Crisis: A Communications Toolkit for ULC Libraries
Transcript
Erum Noor: Hello and welcome to the BookNet Canada podcast. I'm Erum Noor, marketing and research associate at BookNet Canada. This month’s episode was created in collaboration with a Tech Forum session. BookNet research suggests that the percentage of Canadian readers who prefer audiobooks over other formats increased from 8% in 2020 to 16% in 2025.
Let’s listen to this session’s host, Tim Middleton, talk to a panel of experts about the the popularity of audiobooks, the reason behind this increase, how they champion audiobooks, what opportunities and challenges they face, how the industry could look in the future as technology evolves, and much more. To watch the full recording and read the transcript visit the Tech Forum website at bnctechforum.ca.
Tim Middleton: Okay. Let’s talk audiobooks. I’m excited. So, my first question is going to be for everyone, and then I’ll just…maybe we’ll…I’ll start with Carlyn, and then we’ll go around to my right. So, for all, our Canadian Leisure and Reading Study revealed that the percentage of readers who prefer audiobooks continues to rise from 8% in 2020 to 16% in 2025. And 19% of the respondents said that their perception is that they’re spending more time listening to audiobooks. So, the first question is, what do you think is behind the increase in adoption of this format? Carlyn, you want to kick us off?
Carlyn Craig: Yeah. Okay. Well, I would say the number one reason is that Audible opened in 2018, and started promoting more in Canada. So, we saw a big change there. Beyond that, I think it’s a combination of the convenience, marketing, and people being more comfortable with the technology that delivers audiobooks. Having a smartphone that you can play them on anywhere makes it just so much more convenient.
So, if you think about it, the main reason people start adopting audiobooks is the convenience. You can listen while you’re driving, while you’re gardening, walking the dog, doing housework. You can’t read while you’re doing that. So, that’s a big driver, but it doesn’t change the behaviour. It’s the marketing and promoting.
I was a huge reader, and I was an absolute snob. I wouldn’t listen to audiobooks. Finally, when my son was six and he had a serious eye tracking issue, that was why he wasn’t learning to read. We didn’t discover that until about then, but I couldn’t keep up with his reading needs. And so, we finally resorted to audiobooks, and then I had this total epiphany. I fell in love with them myself. I realised there were so many people who can’t read comfortably. They can read, they’re literate, but reading has so many things going on in your brain. Things can go wrong. So, my desire is to get more people hooked on audiobooks because there’s a lot of people who aren’t book people because of reading, and they think they’re not book people when, in fact, they’re book people. They just have maybe some dyslexia or some other thing going on. But I think it’s a combination of the convenience, but that promotion. The promotion really didn’t start to happen in Canada until after 2018.
Tim: Okay. Thanks. Lisa, did you want to…?
Lisa Radha Vohra: So, to add on to what Carlyn has said, in the public library world, we track preferences by circulation. And so, as more and more content was available in audiobooks, we saw public library customers all across Canada devour the physical audiobook format, for sure. And then our huge shift came during the pandemic when, unfortunately, public libraries weren’t able to as easily lend physical formats, but that digital format of audiobooks skyrocketed. And we all started asking each other, hey, are you seeing the same trends? We thought, it can’t be everywhere, but it literally was everywhere. So, whether people were using it for preferences, many of the things that Carlyn spoke about, or whether it was because it was just easier than having a book and some noise, some company, another voice to have while many people were isolated. And as the pandemic of loneliness has increased, we definitely have seen audiobooks usage and preference also increasing.
Tim: Interesting. That’s really neat. Pamela, we’ll go down to you.
Pamela Campbell: Hi, everyone. Again, what Carlyn and Lisa have said is 100% true as well from the retailer side here. But it’s interesting to note that as more and more titles have become made into audiobooks simultaneous with the print, I think that’s a massive factor there. You can get the new release the day it’s in hardback, it’s in audio, digital audio as well. So, just the quick turnaround of getting the audio the same day as available. You don’t have to choose, you could get both. I’m one of those people. So, I think that, the availability, and that the publishers are also getting behind the audiobook format. That’s massive. It wasn’t always that way. But now, the audio side is working with the hardback print side in marketing, and making sure people are aware that the audiobook is an option. So, that’s what I’ll add to that.
Tim: Nice. Thanks. And Michelle, over to you.
Michelle Kaatz: Yeah. I mean, there’s so many factors, and everyone, I agree with everything that you guys have said so far. I think the improved sentiment surrounding audiobooks. More and more people are coming over. And I think it’s in part also a byproduct of just a listening culture, like I am seeing on every news outlet that I visit. Click here to listen to this article. I see it on … like email newsletters sometimes have an audio version. Blog posts, medium posts have a listening version. And so, I think people are just incorporating listening into their lives in many ways. And so, audiobooks are going to follow from that.
And also, we cannot understate the impact that Spotify has had. I think, growth in the audiobook markets has always kind of been in lockstep with better access, better delivery mechanisms, more books. And Spotify’s model to a lot of people is going to feel free because they already pay for the service. And it’s not another app. It’s not another account. And they’re looking for something to listen to anyway. And they have seen some pretty serious numbers. And I think that that is definitely … a major part of very recent adoption is coming from them as well.
Tim: Thank you. Those are all really insightful points. And our second question is looking… Again, for everyone, only this time, I’m going to go around reverse order. So, get ready. Looking back at the last five to ten years, what has changed in how you approach audiobooks from your corner of the industry? For example, have your strategies to reach listeners changed over time? Michelle?
Michelle: Sorry. Tech glitch. Yeah. So, for me, from my perspective, one of the big things in the work that I do with publishers and with mostly independent authors right now is the question on distribution. And like Pam and Carlyn were literally around when we were having conversations about wide distribution like a decade ago. And it used to be a thing where Audible offered such a lucrative deal to be exclusive with them. And it was really hard to convince people to go… Maybe I’m overstating that it was really hard. But when you were having a discussion, it was always kind of like, do you want to make the most money possible or do you want to be in libraries, access different readers? And there were all these sort of soft arguments that you had to make. And just with the growth of the industry generally, new retailers coming into the picture, current retailers and libraries growing and growing like crazy, that conversation just looks so different. And it is no longer like the default is Audible exclusive. And here’s the reasons to consider wide distribution. I almost want to say it’s like 50/50, maybe even a little bit inverted, especially because people love libraries and they love… With Libro.fm, they love independent booksellers. So, that has been a really interesting change for me to see.
Tim: Pamela?
Pamela: Yes. So, being one of the competitors for Audible, Audiobooks.com, we’ve always taken a thought process that books should be in as many places available, everywhere, for everybody to access. It’s more about making sure if you want to listen, you can find a place to listen. So, what I’ve been delightful, because I do deal with a lot of the publishers and work with publisher contracts, is we are seeing some of the smaller publishers reach out to us directly instead of going through either a distributor themselves or they’ve reached out and have said, look, I don’t have it in audio yet. I’m going to get it in audio. What specs do I need to have it with you? So, I love seeing that these smaller publishers or even authors are going about it, and just reaching out and trying to find a way to get their books in front of people. And that’s been really big to see.
And then just, too, we are seeing, like Michelle mentioned, the other big giant, Spotify. They are opening up doors for people to just know that audiobooks are a thing. So, while we haven’t really changed the way we try to reach our listeners, we just try to give them the best listening experience, and making sure we have as many different options available to our authors, to the publishers to find a way to fit their content with a contract that everyone’s going to win.
Tim: Lisa.
Lisa: I agree with everything that’s already been said. And from the library world, things that we’ve really changed is ensuring that everyone understands. And I’ll post a link into the chat, too, is that listening to audiobooks is defined as reading. There has been a little bit of a battle, as was the case also with graphic novels or other new formats or newer different formats. We have really pushed to help everyone understand, as Carlyn has said very clearly, audiobook listening is reading.
And then exactly what Pamela had said earlier, too, about really supporting the vendors and understanding that we do want on the same day that the print is available. Our customers want audiobooks available, too, and ensuring that we do that purchasing. Purchasing does continue to be difficult. Ten years ago, our average circ sat about $1.50. Right now, our average circ is sitting about $4 per audiobook. So, sometimes we intentionally have to choose solely the audiobook or the print book. So, sometimes those are difficult decisions.
And one thing, the last thing that I’ll say that we make sure that has really changed, but to ensure that there is awareness about this format, is that we specifically have curated lists, like listen and learn or hear me now. But even in our traditional book lists now, where in the past, I don’t think audiobooks were as intentionally always included. We always intentionally ensure now that that format is always included in a traditional book list, too, even if it’s not just a solely audiobook list.
So, there are a lot of things that have changed as the demand increases. But really, depending on those publishers, ensuring authors get paid fairly, is working with our publishing partners to make sure that the content that our customers are looking for is available. And our biggest barrier, whether it’s intentional or unintentional, is those Audible exclusives, because we continually do get asked for them at the library. And we do let our customers know why we don’t have access to that content.
Tim: Interesting. Carlyn?
Carlyn: Well, I’m agreeing with everything everyone said. It’s interesting because this question of Audible exclusive came up. And when I started out, I came from this scholarly publishing background, and just a book lover myself. And so, I always did non-exclusive with Audible for years. And we had… you know, I publish… my catalogue is fairly eclectic. I like nonfiction, the popular genres. I don’t have a lot of the popular genres. I have the popular genres, but they’re down the list.
And then we had an experience with a book that we published that just sold incredibly. And when I crunched the numbers three years later, it was 98% sold on Audible, even though it was non-exclusive, and it was available everywhere and in the libraries. And yet 99% of the sales was Audible. And I had to stop and think about my approach because of that. I didn’t like exclusive, I wanted to be everywhere. And I had to look at that and start, you know, just questioning whether I needed to do that for every book. I now often go exclusive with Audible because you can do that for 90 days. And then after 90 days, you can go non-exclusive. And you can take advantage of their promo codes in those 90 days, or you can leave it for a year or two, and then go non-exclusive. So, I’m kind of pushing back on the non-exclusive argument.
But I wouldn’t do that for every book. Lots of our books are really going to be more popular in the library than selling anywhere. And so, it really depends on the title. But I agree that just explosion in the ways you can get it. There’s also Storytel for Europe, which includes a lot of… You have to watch what you’re doing, because a lot of these guys have a lot of overlap in the conglomerate distributors. You don’t want necessarily be on INaudio and Authors Republic and…well, Storytel, I think you want to use Storytel in conjunction with one of those two. And then you can also put your books directly onto Spotify now. And authors can go and put their book directly onto Spotify. So, that, I think, does open it up and just make them more accessible for everybody.
Tim: Very interesting to hear all of that. Going to move on to our third question. And I’m going to just mix up the order. So, when I call on you… So, are there any trends in audiobook consumption that have stood out to you? I’m sure there are. Do you find, for example, that audiobooks from particular genres do better than others? And who wants to go first? We’ll start with Pamela.
Pamela: Okay. So, for us on our site, absolutely. We have certain genres that trend year round, specifically mystery thrillers, psychological thriller, mystery. And then what’s been trending for the last few years, romantasy. Now, we do see different trends at different times of years…of the year. Obviously, in January, there’s an uptick in nonfiction and self-help and self-development. But we do find — as always, I’m sure everyone else sees this, too — when a book is turned into a film or a TV show, it will bubble up to the top as well. And now, with BookTok influencers, that also does trend up.
But one thing, we are a relatively smaller team here at Audiobooks.com. So, we can quickly adapt. So, we can quickly create book lists and add in the different genres that’s trending. We’re usually waiting on the publishers to update with new bisects to get those in… so we can fill in those trending genre listening there. But for us, it’s primarily fiction. Women’s fiction is doing actually really well recently. But, yeah, the psychological thriller domestic mystery is what we see a lot of listeners gravitating towards with us.
Tim: Thanks. Over to you, Michelle.
Michelle: So, the work that I do is a little bit less trend focused just because I’m working with what someone brings. So, if you’re a publisher that happens to have romantasy, great. If you just publish books about trees, then the trends are probably like a little bit less relevant to you. From a production standpoint, there’s not too much. Like, a good audiobook is a good audiobook. And so, the kind of best practices still hold.
But one thing that’s interesting to me is that… So, there’s a rule of thumb, typically, when you’re sort of forecasting how many books your… how many units your audiobook is going to sell. And you usually look at, if you’re doing backlist, like the print and ebook have already come out, between 5% on the low end to like 15% on quite the high end of whatever that total of print and ebook has sold, that’s kind of what you can estimate your audiobook sales to be. But as the audiobook market keeps growing and growing and growing, that number is changing. And so, the books in a publisher’s catalogue that are becoming more viable is growing again.
So, just across the board, it’s almost like…there is a period where there’s a lot of backlist, and then the backlist all got…all the economically viable backlist got acquired and produced and it’s out there. But as the market grows, it’s refreshing itself, and deeper and deeper layers of books are becoming good projects again. So, that’s the trend that I’m seeing.
Tim: Carlyn.
Carlyn: I would agree. I think there’s still a lot of interesting backlist stuff out there, but it depends. So, we’re a fairly small publisher and producer now, too. And we’ve always stayed small intentionally. It’s my company, I want to do what I’m interested in. So, I, again, don’t really look at the trends, but I do look at…I have bell hooks books, and they sell really well. And that took me a lot. I know Michelle’s like, I’m going to get those. Those are really great books.
And so, I do look at backlist titles for stuff that’s been missed, and it doesn’t have to be, for me, a top seller. I just want to make my money back and create a little profit. I’m not trying to become a top number one publisher. I just want to publish books I really love and I believe in. And so, I do still mind the backlist titles.
I really like self-development. I really like politics and history. So, I tend to follow…we’re actually just producing “The Dual State,” Ernst Fraenkel, which is interesting because that’s really been talked about a lot right now. There’s a bunch of articles about it recently because he was writing about how the fascists in Germany created a dual state in law. So, we’re just producing that. So, we will go for titles like that. Again, I really don’t watch the top ones. Also, to get into those top levels, you’ve got to either be lucky or you have to have deep pockets because they know what they’ve got, and the advances are steep.
Tim: Gotcha. So, I’ve left Lisa to last, thinking Toronto Public Library, you got to know.
Lisa: Everything that Carlyn and Michelle or Pamela specifically have said is completely reflected in my work of all of those trends and definitely the demand for the backlist. We are seeing a tiny decline right now in the demand for nonfiction, but I think it’s more reflective of the wider ecosystem of the world that we’re living in than as a sort of longer-term trend. So, we will continue to buy those nonfiction titles because we know people are going to circle back to them.
But when you look at the stats that have been posted in the chat for everyone from the ULC ebooks toolkit, which also includes audiobooks, but it’s about all digital content. It really is the importance of the backlist and the smaller publishers making content accessible to us. The big five content is there. It is always in demand, but we would rather ensure that we have a longstanding perpetual access backlist available because that is an increase in trend that we’re seeing, again, in addition to all the romantasy stuff and all the top trending stuff that Pamela referred to.
Tim: Thank you. That’s our first group round. We’re going to ask some individual questions for each of you. So, I have some here. The first one I’m going to start with is for Carlyn. I think you may have answered this already. Do these trends impact your decision about what books to acquire?
Carlyn: Okay. No, not really, but that’s just because of the kind of publisher I am. Our production arm, we get to do a lot of other variety. So, you know, multicast, we’ve done some 3D audio. So, for us, though, in terms of acquiring rights, I’m going after things that I’m interested in. I’m on lists. So, I do see books coming across my desk that I kind of might go for, a lot of the time, the really good ones. Again, I can’t go high enough for the advance. So, it does affect us a little bit, but we are kind of an eclectic publisher. So, not governed necessarily by the same rules.
Tim: Our next question is for Lisa. How do audiobook borrowing trends impact the acquisitions process? Is there anything else you consider when deciding what to get for your library?
Lisa: Especially at Toronto Public Library, one of the biggest things that we’re always looking for is French, indigenous, and multilingual content. There is a huge demand for that content and a huge shortage of that content being available. We fully acknowledge the… and so respectful of all the work that everyone else on this panel does to make this content available to us. So, we acknowledge the cost of that material. But there is definitely an unmet need in non-English content.
And I would just go back to everything that Carlyn has said. Reading and learning English is a huge challenge, but there are many people in our community… especially in Toronto, we serve over 80 languages. Many people who are looking to learn further or deepen their knowledge of their first language or their second, third, fourth language that they work in or that they live in, and would love to have access to that content, too, in their libraries.
Tim: That makes a lot of sense. Pamela, this question is for you. What about the retailer side? Do trends play a role in choosing what to offer to customers and what to promote? What else plays a role in this process?
Pamela: One hundred percent, they play a role in what we promote to our listeners. We’re a retailer, we need to give people what they’re looking for. So, if you’re searching for something, we’re trying to get it in front of you the fastest, easiest way for you to find what you’re looking for. We work a lot with book lists, making sure we’re keeping up with, again, book to screen or if…FIFA is on right now. So, soccer-related stories, things like that. Whatever is trending outside, we have our eyes on it and are trying to decide, A, do we have enough books for that? Like Lisa said, there are certain trends that come out that we just don’t have the content to put in front. So, we wouldn’t. But, yeah, 100% what is trending outside of the audiobook world is also impacting what we’re promoting to our listeners.
Tim: Thanks. Michelle, when advising publishers who are new to audiobooks, how much do trends influence the first steps you recommend?
Michelle: I spoke too much in the first round. I gave most of my answers. Not too much, but you know, it might be a question of if you’re new and you’re establishing your catalogue, where you start. Maybe you want to start with books that are going to generate cash more quickly or maybe there’s a really opportune moment to pluck something out and approach that first. But, yeah, for the most part, it doesn’t affect my work that much.
Tim: So, our next…we have some more individual questions. Stats from our leisure studies show a whopping 84% of Canadian readers tend to prefer listening to a human narrator over synthetic AI narration. Yay. But the applications of AI are not limited to narration. As AI continues to evolve and as the industry continues to figure out how to approach it, Carlyn, is there anything in the audiobook workflow production and distribution that has changed or that you envision will change because of AI?
Carlyn: Well, I think that, obviously, there are going to be people using synthetic voices, but in terms of post-production, we’re exploring different ways to use AI to make post-production less expensive because audiobooks are expensive to produce. So far, I haven’t really found anything. I love Pozotron, but Pozotron doesn’t replace a human listening with a good set of headphones and a proper interface. It just doesn’t. We’ve been looking at Descript to see what we can do with it because it’s changed a lot. It’s really designed for podcasting, but we were looking to see, could it streamline certain things like, for instance, we produced a book recently with an author where they had a really poor internet connection. So, rather than doing…taking control of their computer and punching, we had to do a roll recording. So, we were looking to see if Descript would decrease the time to edit. So far, I still think humans are winning the game. In the end, we still have to go back to a human, and they have to do the actual work of listening and applying actual intelligence instead of the fake one.
Tim: Mm-hmm. Lisa. Libby, for example, implemented AI discoverability features. Do you envision AI becoming part of the patron experience in any other way?
Lisa: I think AI is great for things like accessibility, awareness, and availability. I agree with everything that Carlyn has said, and I think it’s so important that anything AI on any platform be an opt-in for our customers. At TPL, we have not received any good feedback on the Libby AI discoverability features, whether it’s from staff or from customers. So, again, exactly what Carlyn said, I think there are some workflow things that will provide greater accessibility, awareness, and availability. But our customers are definitely…our 4 million customers continue to definitely look for the human narrators and the human-validated features so that they continue to receive the high-quality service that they’re used to from our publishing partners and the library.
Tim: This one’s for Pamela. Is AI impacting the audiobook buyer experience? What role, if any, is AI playing in how you sell and promote audiobooks?
Pamela: The first thing I’ll say about AI is, if a book is narrated using AI or is written with AI, we need it labeled as such. It is a requirement from all of our publishers, big or small, that if it is, have any sort of AI in terms of narration or written, that it be flagged that way. We never want our listeners to feel duped or switched that they thought they were getting a human-narrated book and it’s not. So, that is something we take very seriously on our end and had even implemented safe checks on our side before the APA came out with all of their workflow for that.
In terms of recommendations and search, it’s not something we’ve fully explored on our end yet. Like both Carlyn and Lisa have said, there’s… nothing will beat a human or a personal recommendation yet. It is something I do see a lot of promise for some of the tools that are being explored. I think there’s great opportunity there. But for us, for what I deal with specifically, we just want to make sure everything is labeled correctly so that the listeners can choose. Do you want to listen to a digital narrator or not?
Now, they’ve come leaps and bounds in terms of what a digital narrator used to be. And now, I will sometimes listen to a sample to see if I can pick out an AI narrator, and it’s getting harder. But you still can. And I think some of the publishers are starting to dip their toe into it a little more. I do think there is the capability of what it can bring to bringing titles that otherwise would not get into audiobooks. I think is…what I think is the best thing about specifically AI narration is that it will have the opportunity to bring titles that might not otherwise be available in audiobook format to the listeners.
Tim: Yeah. Good point.
Carlyn: I just wanted to add something. Pamela, I was at a… IBPA did a thing on AI. And they said that their stats were showing that more people are going to ChatGPT and places like that to ask for book recommendations. And then those book recommendations…and also Amazon has changed the way it does its book recommendations. And so, before, where you used to get a whole host of choices, now you see one or maybe two. So, I think it’s impacting it negatively in some ways.
Pamela: It’s interesting because you can take the good pieces and then you get…what should be giving you more and opening up boundaries is somewhat closing in on itself in some areas of what I’ve seen in terms of testing and looking at things.
Tim: And then I think, Michelle, this will be our last question before we want to open it up to the audience for Q&A. So, this is your AI question. As a multifaceted audiobook professional who works with publishers in different stages of their audiobook journey, how do you recommend they approach AI?
Michelle: First off, this conversation will be different six months from now, a year from now. It was different a year ago. The tools are changing so quickly. The audience and the reception is changing. As part of my class, one of the modules, we listen to a whole bunch of AI. And there’s a bunch of bad AI voices, and there are a bunch that are really not that bad anymore. And I get the students’ opinions. And some of them are like, yeah, you know what? This isn’t terrible. Some of them are absolutely like, I would never listen to this, and a fair amount of them. And these are book people taking a book class. And they’re like, I could listen to this.
And the quality is going to continue to improve. And I think, much like any acquired taste, it comes through exposure, not intent. So, the more that we hear just in daily life on the phone, on websites, having ChatGPT read something aloud to you, it does start to change your ears. So, I wonder, in two or three years, as it gets incorporated into other aspects of life, how the user reception will be at that point. But for me as a producer, when I’m talking to authors or publishers about it, the first thing is like, no one has ever gone to an AI because it does a better job. It’s because it does a cheaper job. That is kind of the only reason to do it at this point, I think. I’ve seen in a few places… I can’t attribute it. I don’t remember where I read it first, but they said, if the AI auditioned, they wouldn’t get the job. They have a pleasant tone, but not really any performance behind it.
So, if you spin up your P&L, and it looks like you can make money doing a traditional production, to me, the discussion ends there because you’re going to make money and it’s going to be better. We don’t need to think any more about it. But where it becomes you have to start asking the harder questions is when you look at that P&L and you go, oh, I can’t pay 6,000 or 8,000 or 10,000 or however…you know, we were just talking about how much people like the long books. Long books are very expensive, right? So, then you have to start asking, you know, you’ve got your moral question of period… this software is built on stolen content, no consent, no compensation, period. So, to move forward, you have to reconcile that.
And then even on the business question, I think people are kind of… they’re not engaging with it because they don’t like it. And so, I wonder how many people have a real experience of using it. It’s not as cheap as a lot of people think that it should be. And it’s a lot more… there’s a lot more manual intervention. Like Carlyn, you were saying, you know, when you see a demo and it sounds relatively like performative and expressive, that’s because a human probably went through and curved all of the… you know what I mean? And did a lot of interventions. So, it’s not necessarily easier either.
That being said, I think it’s naive to think that there are no business cases where the only way to do it is with AI. And there’s an argument for access. There is an argument for using aggregate sales from lower-demand books to build a strong traditional audio publishing business as well. So, there’s a lot of ways to look at it. Ultimately, it’s not the kind of thing that I can…I wouldn’t advise someone directly on that. I just kind of bring them all the things to think about and then let them know. And I haven’t had a single person choose AI so far.
Tim: Very, very good points. And I do want to get to our Q&A now. So, I’m just going to keep going. I mean, I want to stop and talk about all this stuff even more. We’ll have to have more of these. So, first question that I have from our audience is, does anyone have tips to build a community to bring people closer to audiobooks? Let’s start with the library.
Lisa: I won’t go on for too long, but I feel like I’ve sort of already answered this. Curate, curate, curate. Yeah. So, either have specific audiobook lists, all your regular lists have audiobook contents. And then just because I’ve got three amazing content providers on the call, anytime that you can partner with a content provider to provide simultaneous use, the [One eRead] Canada programme, all the publishers in Canada participate to give English and French audio content for those titles for all libraries to access. Just making it available and being affordable for libraries is how we’re attempting to build that audiobook content. And then I’ll just repeat one other thing that I said, too. Just ensure that everyone understands that listening to audiobooks is reading, is literacy. It’s the same. And whether it’s your preference or whether that is your capability. So, that’s what I would say for that one. Thanks, Tim.
Tim: Very nice. Thank you. I just want to… if anybody has anything to add, go for it, but otherwise, I’ll move on.
Carlyn: No, I want to add to that. Because Lisa’s pointed out that audiobook, listening is reading. Listening can improve your reading skills. It can improve your retention. It can improve your vocabulary. But the other thing is in terms of building a community. In Germany, they’re crazy about audiobooks. They have shows where they’ve got the actors on stage and a Foley pit, and they’re performing audiobooks to 20,000 and 30,000 and 40,000 people in an audience. And I’d love to see that here. Those are so much fun. And they’ve been doing this for a long time. I can’t remember. The first time I heard about it was at least nearly a decade ago, and they’re still doing them. I looked it up recently for this conference. So, I think something like that, where you really have people going and enjoying an audiobook together in an audience. And that could…I don’t know. I guess they’re probably doing abridged books or shorter books, but it’s a real phenomenon there.
Tim: That sounds really interesting.
Michelle: Yeah. That sounds amazing, Carlyn. I just have one very quick point to add to this. If you want to talk about communities and audio, the romance audiobook community is such a dream community to publish for and engage with. And I think that was a very organically generated community, but it has definitely been…some gasoline has been poured onto it because the narrators are so…they engage so much. And there are these amazing events about specifically…I mean, I guess it’s about romance print and ebook as well, but really finding other ways where people can engage other than just buying the product. There’s such a lovely community to serve. And I would look at that as kind of like an ideal.
Tim: And Pamela.
Pamela: Yeah. Continuing on with what Michelle said there, once you find the narrators in the audiobook, they are celebrities in themselves. Often, people will choose a book based on the narrator. People will choose not to listen to a book based on the narrator. So, once you can tap into that, if you can get extra content, behind-the-scenes footage to give that, so you kind of make the listener feel like they’re part of even the process. Oh, wow, look, there’s Carlyn in her booth recording a book. How cool is that?
Carlyn: I don’t narrate.
Pamela: The audiobook listeners will fall in love with the narrator. And that is something that can build its own… build on itself and build its strength there.
Erum: Before I go, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge that BookNet Canada's operations are remote and our colleagues contribute their work from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi’kmaq, the Ojibwa of Fort William First Nation, the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations (which includes the Ojibwa, the Odawa, and the Potawatomie), the Métis, as well as the unceded and ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, or Tsleil-Waututh peoples, the original nations and peoples of the lands we now call Beeton, Guelph, Halifax, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vancouver, Vaughan, and Windsor.
We encourage you to visit the native-land.ca website to learn more about the peoples whose lands you are listening from today. Moreover, BookNet Canada endorses the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and supports an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to space-making in the book industry. The book industry has long been an industry of gatekeeping. Anyone who works at any stage of the book supply chain carries a responsibility to serve readers by publishing, promoting, and supplying works that represent the wide extent of human experiences and identities in all that complicated intersectionality. We at BookNet are committed to working with our partners in the industry as we move towards a framework that supports space-making, which ensures that marginalized creators and professionals all have the opportunity to contribute, work, and lead.
We would also like to acknowledge the Government of Canada for their financial support through the Canada Book Fund, and of course, thanks to you for listening.
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