On this episode of Self-Publishing with ALLi, Dan Holloway reports that audiobook sales grew 9 percent in the US and 10 percent in the UK in 2025 — a return to double-digit growth — but cautions that active titles grew even faster, meaning many individual authors are getting a smaller slice of a bigger pie. He also questions a suspiciously low 0.03 percent figure for AI-narrated audiobook sales, and examines an Authors Guild survey finding that only a quarter of readers paid for the book they were reading last month, with library lending and “other sources,” including piracy, making up much of the rest.
Listen to the Podcast: Audiobook Growth Returns to Double Digits
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
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Read the Transcript
Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to another week of Self-Publishing News. This week the main story is about audiobooks and audiobook growth. You'll remember from earlier in the year Spotify's claim that its listening hours rose by 60 percent over the past year. That's clearly a huge development for them, but we now have figures giving us the wider context that sits around it.
We have figures for both the US and the UK. You'll recall there was about a decade where I was reporting double-digit growth every single year, which tailed off a little in the last couple of years. This year in the US, growth is 9 percent — 2025 audiobook sales grew by 9 percent, almost back to double-digit growth, taking the total market to $2.43 billion. In the UK the total market is smaller, at £255 million — somewhere in the region of $300-something million — but growth there was 10 percent, back into double digits. It really does seem that audiobooks are on the rise again, and if the figures are to be believed, Spotify has played a large part in that.
A Growing Title Count Means a Smaller Slice for Many Authors
Another really interesting figure sets that growth in context. In the US we saw a 43 percent rise in what the Association of Audio Publishers calls active titles — titles you can actually buy, download, or access through a streaming service like Spotify or ElevenReader. That took the total number of active titles to 750,000, a 43 percent increase between 2024 and 2025.
You don't need to be a mathematician to see what that means: the number of titles grew faster than the number of sales. The clear implication is that the pie is growing more slowly than the number of slices it's being divided into — which means that for many individual authors, their slice of that pie is shrinking. We are increasingly fighting for a share of a much larger market, with many more competing titles.
One figure from the survey I'm genuinely skeptical about: only 0.03 percent of audiobook sales were attributed to AI-narrated books. The obvious assumption, given how quickly the number of titles has grown, would echo what we've seen with ebooks — remember the jump from three million to four million ebook titles in 2025, largely attributed to AI-generated content. But the figures here claim that's not the case for audiobooks. I'm very skeptical, and I'd want to dig into this further, because the sheer amount of attention something like the ElevenLabs collaboration with Spotify and ElevenReader has received suggests that more than 0.03 percent of titles are likely AI-generated. Doing some quick math: 0.03 percent of 750,000 titles works out to roughly 250 titles. That feels implausibly low, so I remain skeptical.
Do Readers Pay for What They Read? An Authors Guild Survey
Let's leave that bit of skepticism about audiobooks and move to something else people are often skeptical about: whether readers actually pay for what they read. This comes from a survey by the Authors Guild. The headline figure: only a quarter of readers surveyed had paid for a book in the last month. In other words, at least 75 percent of people reading books had not paid for the book they were reading that month — though some of them may have paid for a different book. This is being treated as a significant problem, though I'm not entirely sure it's as big a problem as it's being made out to be. Maybe other people don't have the size of to-be-read pile that I do — I could spend a very long time reading through everything I've already paid for before I'd need to buy another book. How many readers fall into that category, I'm not sure.
One interesting subcategory the survey looked at: library borrowing accounts for a generous third of how people access either audiobooks or digital books. There's a lot of lending happening through libraries, and that's being counted as ‘not paying' for a book — although in many cases authors do receive a portion of what libraries pay for licensing the book or the subscription service. You'll recall I talked a couple of weeks ago about OverDrive and how it gets books and audiobooks into libraries, along with the royalty rates being collected on that. So it isn't necessarily true that authors gain nothing when readers borrow from libraries — it's simply that readers aren't paying directly for those books.
The really interesting figure is what the survey calls ‘other sources.' For text and digital books, 16 percent of readers got the book they were reading from other sources. For audio, that rises to 27 percent — and the survey defines ‘other sources' as including piracy. A lot of that, particularly for audio, appears to come from sources like YouTube, where content isn't always posted and monetized by the rights holders, and from pirate libraries such as Library Genesis.
So the problem is probably not quite as large as the headline figure suggests. But the proportion of readers not participating in the economy of book buying — somewhere between a sixth and a quarter, depending on the format — is substantial enough to be noteworthy.
On that note of noteworthy skepticism and noteworthy substantialness, that's probably enough for this week. I'll leave you with those thoughts and go return to my to-be-read pile — books I paid for long before this month, and books I have most definitely paid for this month, all of which I'm enjoying. I wish you a very happy week and will speak to you again at the same time next week. Thank you.
