When is a book not a book? When it is performed by a starry cast of hundreds. Except it has always been more complicated than thatNews this week of a 17% hike in the UK’s audiobook sales might seem like a niche business story, but it raises an existential question. What exactly is an audiobook today? Is it a book? Is it a play? Or is it becoming something else entirely? What is clear is that a jostle for market dominance is driving it into new dimensions. The streaming platform Spotify followed its move into podcasting two years ago with the launch of an audiobooks business. Though it has yet to start making its own recordings, last autumn it made a deal for 200,000 audiobooks to be available to its premium users.Not to be outdone, Amazon-owned Audible – accustomed to being the market leader – upped its game, hiring the Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes to record multi-voice versions of the Dickens novels Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, and announcing last month that it had reached an agreement for a recording of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, voiced by more than 100 actors and featuring a “groundbreaking new soundscape”. The new Potter audiobooks, it said, would not usurp but “sit alongside and complement” conventional recordings by Stephen Fry and Jim Dale, which Audible also hosts. Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2024-05-10 17:25:03 UTC ]
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Written By: Lisa Campbell Quercus has announced that its market share has increased by 103% in a year. The publishing group responsible for Stieg Larsson's best-selling Millennium Trilogy, revealed the group dominated 1.37%, up from 0.66% in 2009 in a market that declined by 1.7%. Quercus chief... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-02-02 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Lisa Campbell Waterstone's is cutting orders it makes on new titles from March to reduce its number of returns. The book retailer contacted suppliers this week asking them to reduce initial orders by about 20%. Publishers were asked to cancel existing pre-orders so that new orders... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-01-28 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Demand Media started trading on the New York Stock Exchange this week, making it one of the first IPOs of 2011 and certainly one of the largest media IPOs that will be seen all year. Continue reading at Folio Magazine
[ Folio Magazine | 2011-01-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Pearson, the publisher of the Financial Times, said it expects its headline company operating profits to balloon by around 20% in 2010, helped by the performance of its flagship business newspaper. Continue reading at Media Week
[ Media Week | 2011-01-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Simon & Schuster requested that journalists and other writers not comment if asked whether they were responsible for the novel O, about a fictional 2012 presidential campaign. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2011-01-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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