What if readers stopped reading?

AND ONLY LISTENED TO AUDIOBOOKS

I’m looking at the rising rates of readers listening to audiobooks. I’m seeing authors sign audiobook-only deals where they don’t even produce an e-book. I’m also feeling the shift in culture to where people still want stories but prefer to consume those stories while engaging in other activities like commuting, working out or doing something around the house.

All of these things made me think of a future literary world in which writers exclusively produced audiobooks. What would that world look like? And how would storytelling change for writers if they knew their book would be heard instead of read?

Is an audio-only publishing industry possible?

It might sound extreme right now. We’ve been hearing about e-books replacing physical books since the emerging of Amazon. But despite the increased popularity of e-books over the pandemic, digital sales still come nowhere near to the revenue of print books. 2021 and 2022 were record sales years for physical books, selling 843 million and 787.7 million copies in the U.S. respectively. And while we can argue the lockdown had a lot to do with that, the truth is that print sales have been increasing steadily since 2012. That year, 591 million physical books were sold in the U.S., and that number grew to 694 million by 2019.

Things won’t end up being quite as rosy by the time 2023 sales numbers come in. We’ve seen a 1% increase during the first half of the year and will likely end up flat by the time the final numbers are in after the holiday season. Making some assumptions, it would appear that readers are sending a message that e-books are useful, but not unique enough to overwhelm the consumption of hard and softcover books.

Audiobook revenue, on the other hand, continues to rise by double digit percentages year over year. Sales are already up 14.5% in the first half of 2023. 30% of audiobook listeners in the U.S are between 18-29. The current global audiobook market is about $4 billion. By 2032, that number is expected to skyrocket to $39.1 billion, growing at a rate of about 25%/year. What’s even more interesting for me is that the most popular genre that readers are listening to on audiobook is general fiction (65% of all audiobooks sales in 2022), along with genre fiction like mystery and sci-fi. I always thought that it was much easier to listen to non-fiction, which is growing close to 30% annually, but apparently readers enjoy listening to fiction even more.

Advantages of audiobooks

One of the advantages that audiobooks have over both print and digital format is that allows readers to consume more books with less focus. Reading is an intimate engagement that requires you to carve out uninterrupted time. You can’t be doing anything else while you’re reading because it demands your full attention. There are no such limitations with audiobooks.

Another advantage (if you want to call it that) of audiobooks is that it transcends literacy. Anyone can listen to a story regardless of how well they can read. While I’m not promoting a society in which learning to read is irrelevant, I’m simply stating the very real fact that listening to a book is less friction than reading one.

Extrapolating this point a bit further, listening to books could be one way of getting more people to “read.” I couldn’t find research on this yet so it’s just an assumption, but being a parent, myself, I could see how selling my daughter on listening to War and Peace could be far less intimidating than reading it.

Advantages aside, I don’t need to research any figures for you to see that podcasts have taken over (I’ve done the research and this is very much true). You can feel the shift in the way popular culture is consuming stories in general, not just books. When you pair that with the surging popularity of audiobooks, you can begin making a case for a world in which print and e-books are novel items and audiobooks are the dominant force.

How would writing change for authors?

So knowing all of this, I went ahead and surmised how writing would change for authors if they knew their audience was exclusively or primarily listeners and not readers.

1. Format would go out the door

The first thing that comes to mind is format. I’ve read so many books where format is part of the story. Novels like Ru by Kim Thuy or A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James rely on format, at least in part, to help express their words. Listening to a book completely eliminates this nuance of storytelling.

2. The narrative point of view would have to be considered

In fiction, the person who is telling the story is central to how the plot is understood. We’ve all read countless novels where there are more than one narrator or books like The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison that shifts from first to third person seamlessly. It would be difficult and possibly even confusing for someone listening to these stories to understand when the shifts are happening. They can always rewind to catch where they may have fallen off, but authors would have to at least consider how they treat narration knowing that the words on the page would not be seen, only heard.

3. Flashbacks have to be handled skillfully

I recently reread The Handmaid’s Tale, one of Margaret Atwood’s gems that have been reintroduced into current culture’s imagination. Throughout the story, the narrator flashes back and forth from past to present without warning. While Atwood handles these flashbacks flawlessly, I’m not sure how it would translate audibly. Atwood often uses page breaks to indicate a switch in time. I picture myself rewinding several sections just to catch where the present breaks from the past, which I guess is similar to rereading the text. Regardless, listening will take a bit more effort when it comes to interpreting this part of storytelling.

None of these changes would be drastic. People who listen to audiobooks are already consuming fiction which means they’re finding ways to deal with the potential issues I’ve mentioned. Non-fiction listeners will continue to rise and kids' books are my dark horse as far as becoming popular in this potential audiobook-only future.

For now, this is all in my head. But when I think about printing costs, when I consider the current economy and the price of physical books, when I see a behemoth like Spotify enter the audiobook market after changing the music industry forever, it does make me feel like anything is possible. The publishing industry hasn’t felt any significant disruption since WWII when soldiers were reading pocketbooks on the front lines (maybe I’ll do a full post on this). Maybe it’s just time.