Four reasons why the audiobook industry is broken
The interwebs are once again spreading the Good News of yet another company (this time an audiobook retailer) eschewing DRM in favor of .mp3 files. And once again, it seems that few of the news sources haven’t bothered to look beyond a press release and actually see if the claim holds up under scrutiny. In this case, it doesn’t for anyone on a Mac.
So I’m making this proclamation: The audiobook business is broken. Sure, you can point to thousands of happy customers who are unaware of just how broken it is, but that doesn’t change things. And believe me, things need to change. As I see it, there are (at least) four things wrong with the audiobook industry.
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Availability
Call it “The Tyranny of the Trees” if you will, but almost any book you want is available in printed form — even those out-of-print if you look at the resellers. But only a relatively small percentage of printed books ever make it to audio form. Why? Simple. Publishers aren’t willing to make the additional investment required to turn every book into an audiobook.
Now I know it’s hard for a guy distributing well under 300 books to criticize the industry based on scale, especially when there are places boasting 40,000 available titles. Well… we’re working on that. And we don’t expect to bring about this change in thinking through our site alone. Our goal is to leverage something the other audio houses haven’t thought of or are only experimenting with — letting the authors do much of the heavy lifting. No, it doesn’t always sounds as well as paying professionals. And I have no beef with pro audiobook narrators and producers. Love ‘em to death. But faced with having no audiobook at all, author-read/produced seems an acceptable alternative, significantly lowering the cost of production.
Usability
The act of listening to an audiobook is, well, difficult. CDs are great delivery devices for a 90 minute album, but what about 20 hours worth of a single story? That’s a lot of disc-changing and not at all conducive to most peoples’ on-the-go lifestyle. Better for that are downloadable files that play on computers and portable media devices. But these are plagued by their own problems. DRM doesn’t stop illegal copying of files, but it does make it nearly impossible for legitimate users of downloads to enjoy their purchases in more than one location or on more than one device — if they can get it to play at all. True, some sites are eschewing DRM and I hope that trend continues. But I’d like to see the next advance not require special software to “manage” the download. Thanks all the same, but my computer handles downloads just fine, to the tune of thousands of files, links and images every single day.
But if you do successfully manage to navigate through the needlessly cumbersome process of a digital download, you’ll likely be disappointed in the audio quality of the product. Low bit rates are the norm in the download space, and it’s really unnecessary in a world where bandwidth and storage space are anything but scarce. Digital downloads sound like a good idea. But there’s no reason that the final product should not come with a comparable quality to that which you get with shiny plastic discs. (Of course, allowances should be made for lower-speed connections.)
Accessibility
It’s not uncommon for audiobooks to cost more than twice their hardcover counterparts and be an order of magnitude higher in price than the paperback version. To combat this, leading audiobook retailers have taken up a sort of “book of the month club” approach to the market, charging a recurring monthly fee, giving you “earned credits” and discounts for purchases… anything to make it seem less expensive. And for some, perhaps it is. But it sure makes it hard to try anything out and locks you into a commitment. Thanks, but not for me. Things are different for disc-distribution. It may cost more to stamp out 20 discs than it does to print 400 pages. But when looking at a digital download, the cost to distribute approaches zero.
Profitability
If you’re an author fortunate enough to have your publisher produce an audiobook version for you, you’ll likely enjoy compensation on par with that which you already receive for your dead-tree version. And that is what it is, which kind of stinks (published author speaking here). But what if you don’t get that offer (see “Availability” above) and are on your own, ready to invest in the equipment/time/resources to produce your own? It’s an abomination that major audiobook download companies pay out a similar terrible rate — 15% to 20% of sales - for a book that they didn’t pay to have produced. And for a product that has no intrinsic “cost” for each unit sold — it’s a digital download. The cost to carry these titles is incredibly small. So why not pay out more?
So… how do those problems get fixed? Looking back over my list, the last three seem like easy fixes:
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Stop the Quixotic file-hobbling.
Get with the times and improve quality — easier without your worthless proprietary software that is costing you needless cash to support.
Use some of that cash to pay out better rates.
I’ll grant you that #1 is the biggest challenge. Yet plenty of authors are already changing that on their own. I like to think we’re helping with that.
The good news? I honestly think it won’t always be like this. Not because we’re going to run everyone into bankruptcy by offering a few hundred serialized audiobooks for free. Heck, we’ve got our own problems with people not understanding how our file downloads work (working on that). At this point, I just want us to be an alternative to authors, distributors and listeners. If I’m right, like minded people will follow along, and our interesting novelty of a site may become part of a larger movement. Now where did I put those signs and banners…
July 15th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
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July 15th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
Very good points! I’m a big fan of Audio books, the one big minus has always been the price. I use to get my audio books from the library and they were in cassette form. Nothing like listening to a story and finding a broken tape before you get to the end. After I got my first iPod and discovered podcast and Podiobooks, I’ve been in Audio Heaven. I’ve even started my own blog (www.truckerrich.com) to review my favorite Stories and podcasts.
July 16th, 2008 at 12:46 am
Great sum-up ! I completely agree with you and hope that the audio/podio book industry will thrive in future. I’ll link to this on my own literature discussion blog.
July 16th, 2008 at 4:53 am
I recently used the Audible 7.95 for three month deal.
I canceled that right after the third one, the regular 14.95 price is too much. As much as I adore audio books, for any book out for more than a year, I am not willing to pay more than 10 dollars.
To pay more than the paperback price for an audio download I cannot even give to a friend… Insane. I told audible as much, not that I expect them to drop their prices or the foolish DRM.
Maybe more people should drop them a line on their ‘idea’ mailbox: greatideas@audible.com
July 16th, 2008 at 5:55 am
You’re right on the future money. www.baen.com has been selling DRM free e-books for a decade. Check out Eric Flint’s views on the same subject at http://www.baens-universe.com/articles/The_Nature_of_Transitions
Go Podiobooks!
July 16th, 2008 at 7:12 am
[…] Go to the author’s original blog: Comment on Four reasons why the audiobook industry is broken by … […]
July 16th, 2008 at 7:17 am
Amen, brother.
July 16th, 2008 at 7:49 am
You raise some good points, especially about the bandwidth. With movie downloads running in the hundreds of mb, why audio-books are so artificially limited is beyond me.
I think the article oversimplifies the situation though. A publisher strives for high quality, they reject poor and medium quality stories and run through a careful review/edit process to try and ensure the books that are released under their name are reasonably high. To do something similar with an audio-book requires a director, sound editor (with equipment) and voice actor(s) - all of which are expensive, especially when the market for a audio-book is vanishingly small compared to the printed one.
Once the cost to create is over, then the audio can be distributed cheaply forever, but publishers know that popularity of older titles tends to decline rapidly and so the chance to make up the creation-cost by reduced distribution costs may not be so easily done.
July 16th, 2008 at 8:04 am
Glad to see this is striking home with so many. Thanks to those giving kudos.
Mark? You’re right about the oversimplification — to a point. But your still talking about the same old methodologies as “required”. You know, more of what doesn’t work.
July 16th, 2008 at 9:18 am
Mark said:
“To do something similar with an audio-book requires a director, sound editor (with equipment) and voice actor(s) - all of which are expensive, especially when the market for a audio-book is vanishingly small compared to the printed one.”
There’s a presumption that creating a quality narration in a novel length requires those things. I’m gonna take offense at that. I’ll stack my audio quality against pretty much anybody - including McGraw Hill and Audible. It DOES require a certain level of skill and expertise. It does NOT require a $500/hr studio. I could envision a very interesting cottage industry where podiobook authors might be subcontracting with the publishing houses to produce the audio for a flat rate. I’d do the narration for a L.E. Modesitt or Jim Butcher novel in a heartbeat for a $5000 flat rate.
There’s also a causal relationship that the publishing houses are ignoring regarding the “vanishingly small” market.
When you sell a $5 product for $50 — or even $15 — there aren’t gonna be a heck of a lot of people who buy it. The *reason* the market is so small is because they’ve completely lost sight of the price points. Audiobooks need a lower price point than massmarket so we’re looking at an under $10 price — 5.99 maybe — in order to ignite that market segment.
There are MILLIONS of mp3 players out there. A whole industry has grown up supporting them with things like car-adapters, speaker systems, cases, and the like. The ONE place in the market that has failed to keep up is the content — and largely for the reasons that Evo has pointed out above.
- they’re too hard to “consume”
- they’re too expensive to acquire
I think the lack of availability is related to the expense. The chicken-egg problem … they’re too expensive so nobody buys them and since nobody buys them, the publishers don’t produce them — which keeps the price up because it’s not a cost thats amortized across a lot of sales, so they’re too expensive and nobody buys them…
Just my opinion.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Evo -
I agree with three of your four points. And they are critical ones.
I don’t really agree with #2. I can name a dozen friends and relatives who listen to audiobooks regularly, don’t have MP3 players, and will only listen to my podcast if I give it to them on CD. In several cases, I have gotten them to use the feedburner email subscription feature, where they just get the email and click to listen. But it’s not as convenient for them as getting a CD.
The majority of people - and especially audiobooks listeners - still do not listen to a lot of things on their computers. They don’t consider CD’s somehow not conducive to being on-the-go. I’d bet that a huge percentage of Itunes users are under 45, while I suspect there are more audiobooks listeners older than that than younger than that. Most of them are not using audible.com at all. They get their books at the library (it’s amazing how many people do this, and I’ve actually looked into working with libraries on linking to my podcast) and the bookstore/Amazon. I think it’s easy to make the mistake of putting our frame of reference onto the population as a whole.
Now, I am not saying I think that this is either ideal, or that this is how it will be forever. And one could argue that the audience could be bigger if they made them more friendly for the MP3 generations. But I don’t consider this a really big part of how the audiobook industry currently is broken.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Evo Just had to say I agree with all your points.
After reading the comments here I just took a look at Audible.
I saw a book I fancied and then found they want to charge
£43.95 for it.
I’m in the UK.
I am on a limited fixed income and that amount of money would feed my son, cats and I for over a week.
There is not a chance of me ever being able to afford that amount of money for something which at the end of the day is only entertainment.
July 16th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
“But when looking at a digital download, the cost to distribute approaches zero.”
Um, that’s not entirely true. I’m not sure how much Podiobooks.com has to spend on serving podcasts each month, but “This American Life” spends over $150K each year for their weekly podcast bandwidth. That’s not approach zero.
Distribution over the Internet is inexpensive as long as you have a small listenership, but as more people start to consume bandwidth, it gets more expensive. Imagine the cost to Podiobooks if Harry Potter had been electronically distributed through your site :-).
Ben
July 16th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Actually, it is asymptotically approaching zero when you consider that distribution refers to the cost per download, not the total cost of the service.
Delivering HP via IP would be stupidly cheap on a per download basis because one could plan to deliver the ba-zillion copies using a cost-effective service.
Yes, the TOTAL cost of the server storage, the bandwidth, the processing and such does go up, but economies of scale mean that the costs go up VERY much slower than the revenue streams.
July 16th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Ed,
Your disagreement on #2 comes in the form of a support for my argument. As mentioned in the article, you can point to thousands of happy listeners to audiobooks. However, there are hundreds of thousands of others who DON’T have an easy time with it. MP3s aren’t the answer for everyone, but in a digital world, it should be a lot easier to get many more people happier with the process.
July 17th, 2008 at 8:18 am
[…] I have to follow podiobooks, which I do, and Evo Terra nailed this one on the head. He makes some excellent points on audiobooks and the commentary in the comments is just as meaningful and interesting as the article itself. […]
July 17th, 2008 at 8:33 am
[…] Terra over at Podiobooks.com feels that the audiobook industry is broken. It’s not the first time I’ve seen him mention it, and I’m sure it won’t be […]
July 18th, 2008 at 9:18 am
Evo -
Fair enough. But I still think the percentage of people who would download audiobook MP3’s if only it were easier/cheaper is a fairly small part of the potential market. I guess I just think that your other three points are far bigger problems.
Your solutions are definitely heading in the right direction. In a general sense beyond just electronic downloads, people need to see getting audiobooks as being little or no hassle and not being exorbitant. The library (and podcasts if you have Itunes) are the only place where both those things are true right now
July 20th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
I listen to 2 audio books a month. I have two children and the only way I can enjoy a book is to listen to it from my ipod. I have also found a wonderful product called tunecab and it will rip out any drm so far, even audible.
Great Job.
Jason
July 20th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
It’s broken and it will stay that way as long as Microshit has a stranglehold on system platforms. Microshit has always been a vindictive, adversarial, aggressively snotball neighbor in cyberland. Proprietary and platform-specific have always been the chief benchmarks any of their poorly-coded products must exhibit before release.
This is what Steve Jobs had to say about the music industry and it applies to other audio content.
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/
July 21st, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Spare us the juvenile “microshit” comments. Your beloved Jobs broke audiobook playback on the iphone and ipod touch with the 2.0 software “upgrade”. Only short books are working now. Job’s is every bit as bad as MS when it comes to vendor lock-in and proprietary fixations.
On a side note, is it true Jobs has AIDs?
July 21st, 2008 at 2:15 pm
If you can read , he explains why there is such a divergence of differing formats that do not co-exist. As someone who has made their living fixing computers for over twenty years, both hardware and software, excuse me if I think you’re an imbecile. I’ve seen it from the solder side and the inoperable software side. I’ve wathched the purp[osefully engineered software incompatibilities and the pettiness of a pitiful company who contributes nothing and buys or steals superior innovations—then promptly hobnails them with platofrm-specific idiosyncracies designed to cripple any open source or competitive software solutions. Is it true you gave it to him?
July 22nd, 2008 at 5:11 am
Jason Nulph,
I use TuneCab too, it perfectly and fast converts audiobooks and almost all audio/video files. Great tool, try here http://www.tunecab.com
July 23rd, 2008 at 8:23 am
Good points, and it is a big wish list…
But look out because the audiobook industry is about to get yanked into the 21st century, whether it wants to or not.
Some sample changes include: Drag-and-Drop Audiobooks instead of all this file downloading and moving them around. The ability to jump from computer to computer, and have your audiobook experience follow you without moving media or files. A personal bookshelf with multiple open books and bookmarks for each that also follows you around. Each family member can have their own. Make it all globally available and WiFi ready so you can use it anywhere. Add in email support so you can drag-and-drop audiobooks to/from your mail client so you can share with friends and family without violating copyright. And there is just so much more. Virtual Audiobook Technology is here! Now!
The best part… It is so easy a 4 year old can use Illustrated Audiobooks (’Peter Rabbit’ and ‘Benjamin Bunny’) without assistance! Also without assistance, my blind 85 year old mother can use audiobooks that I have put on her ‘bookshelf’, and I can load them from anywhere in the world.
Library subscribers get access to everything with no fees for content. The revenue split with content providers is 50/50.
Audio Pod (www.audiopod.ca) is currently testing technology using a collection of public domain and copyright material, so quality varies for now. Come and have a look at the technology, install and use it for free during the test period. Our resources are limited, so help us work out the rest of the bugs.
You want change… here it comes…
October 30th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Have you looked at CreateSpace.com — for Audio books/cd/audio downloads — they take the lion’s share again, but if someone wanted the CD… (for example, my wife’s car is older, no aux ports, and fm transmitters don’t seem to work…) they want a CD– for quality and ease of use with their older systems… But honestly, 3 years, this will be history.
November 28th, 2008 at 11:38 am
I think you make a number of valid points, and yes, the proprietary formats are a pain, but a s long as so many publishers insist, there is little a distributor can do but help the customers to manage the system. We offer downloadable audio books at prices a fraction of the physical products, and the system is working quite well. Choice is decent also, with over 10′000 titles and grwoing steadily. If you’ve never downloaded an audio book feel free to test the system on us, there are a number of good audiobooks we offer for free.
… and if want a CD, it’s a lot cheaper to burn it yourself from the downloaded file, we have videos online that explain the entire process and customers react really well. My guess is that downloadable audio books will be taking over the market just as downloadable flicks will be the future.