A good life is a full life; but just sometimes we all need precious silence don’t we? And that’s why I love reading books; alone, in another world, sshhhhhhhhhh………
Yes, silence may be golden, but I am not sure it’s what we need while commuting, vacuuming or jogging. And audiobooks now seem to be great option if you don’t want “Top 50 UK hits” belting your eardrums.
Journalists are always thinking about how people digest words now, and how we will in the future; so I was interested in a recent survey by Deloitte.
- Sales of audiobooks are set to overtake ebooks in 2020.
- UK sales of spoken storytelling are set to generate revenue of £115 million in 2020. It would be a 30% on audiobook sales in 2018.
- In comparison, ebooks – predicted as the “future of reading” by The Telegraph in 2009 – are rounding out the decade with a continuing downward trend of ownership. Sales of ebooks fell in 2017 by 4% and have continued to falter.
- While 26% of Britons owned ebooks in 2015, now only 26% read books digitally.
- Print book sales also fell in 2019, by 5.4%; it ended a five-year period of growth for sales of physical books.
- However audiobook sales increased by 43%, bucking the trend with sales of £69 million.
As always, it’s great to see that the art of storytelling is alive and I, for one, don’t mind how we devour words. It will be interesting to see what happens in the future! What do you think?
Photo by Eric Zhu