Why we can’t get enough of audiobooks

Welcome back to Bookmarks, where you can catch up on what’s been happening in the literary world while drinking your Sunday morning coffee.

This week in in books news the 2024 Pulitzer prizes were announced, with Jayne Anne Phillips winning in the fiction category for Night Watch, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall awarded for general nonfiction, and Cristina Rivera Garza taking home the prize for memoir-autobiography for Liliana’s Invincible Summer. Read Benjamin’s Lee’s report for a round up of all the winners. And Shirley Conran, campaigner and “queen of the bonkbuster”, died this week aged 91.

Colm Tóibín spoke to Lisa Allardice for yesterday’s edition of Saturday, ahead of his long-awaited sequel to Brooklyn (which, Lisa discovered, he wrote despite the fact he does not generally approve of sequels) – scroll down to find out what he’s been reading lately. And audiobooks are booming – more on that after this week’s top articles.

New data released by the Publishers Association (PA) on Tuesday showed that the number of audiobook downloads in the UK increased by 17% between 2022 and 2023 – and that over five years, the revenue from audiobooks had more than doubled. Overall, the figures showed the number of physical book sales was slightly down, so why are audiobooks bucking the trend?

There are a few reasons, thinks Fiona Sturges, the Guardian’s audiobook reviewer. First, technological advances mean the audio quality is now so “pin-sharp” – Sturges cites Audible’s multicast, sound effects-filled productions of Dickens classics David Copperfield and Oliver Twist as good examples – that listeners are more easily transported by what they hear. Listeners can control their experience too, changing speeds, or setting a timer so that the book stops playing if they fall asleep.

Audiobooks also allow us to access publications when we are unable to pick up a physical book: when cooking or exercising, for example. In fact, a family member of mine recently told me that the audiobook of The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah got him through a particularly mundane DIY job. While making time to sit down with a book is of course a pleasure in itself, “in a time-poor society you’re more likely to engage people by saying you have the freedom to pick this up whenever,” Sturges says.

I’d add that there’s also something relaxing and nostalgic about being read to – I know this is why some people choose to listen to audiobooks before bed. And as many learned when the audiobook of Prince Harry’s Spare came out, there can be something particularly entertaining about a book that’s read by its author.

Something else that sets audiobooks apart, however, is that there are few options when it comes to choosing where to buy them. Amazon-owned Audible is the market leader, although music streamer Spotify became a competitor last year, when it made audiobooks available to its premium subscribers. Though other providers are available – Audiobooks.com or Spiracle, for instance – it tends to be the books by “big authors with big publishing companies that end up in places like Audible or Spotify, so it’s going to be hard for the independent sector to really make a dent,” Sturges says.

“It’s the way both publishing and the music industry have gone, so I’m not altogether surprised,” she adds. Like musicians, authors are trying to fight back against Spotify: the Society of Authors, the UK’s largest trade union for writers, illustrators and translators, expressed its concern at the streaming deals publishers had made with the app, and issued demands for fairness and transparency.

For consumers, the options might be limited: but remember that audiobooks are often available (for free!) from libraries – so don’t forget to check the website of your local library when you’re looking for your next fix. Speaking of which, Sturges’s current favourite is Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, read by Meryl Streep. Get listening!

The Alternatives, the new novel by Caoilinn Hughes, is written in a style that is chiselled and it’s filled with tones that are vivid and witty and sharply original. The book dramatises the lives of four sisters, each brilliant and complex. They live separate and independent lives in Ireland and elsewhere, but are also – in a strange and convincing way – united as a family. And this conflict in their lives is one of the elements that gives this novel its energy.

Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy is a novel about motherhood, or, rather, it tells one story of one mother and her infant in contemporary Dublin that seems both particular and emblematic. It deals with love – the narrator loves her baby and, as much as she can, her husband. The novel, however, shows, like no other book I have read or can imagine, what it is like to care for a baby day-in, day-out, plus nights. It mixes pure, painful realism with an incantatory sound. This book might not be news for many women; for blokes, it might raise the hair on your head.