On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway reports on ElevenLabs’ new end-to-end audiobook creation and distribution platform aimed at indie authors. He also examines Audible’s new “Read and Listen” feature, which allows users to switch between ebook and audiobook formats, and explores what this growing format convergence could mean for author royalties and reader expectations.
Listen to the Podcast: ElevenLabs Launches Audiobook Platform
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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 Self-Publishing News podcast, from what feels like possibly the first day of spring here in Oxford. The Oxford stone is looking fantastic, and our wonderful libraries look absolutely resplendent with dust from ancient books flickering through rays of sunlight. With that audio description of Oxford, I hope I've set the tone for what appears to be another week where most of the news is focused on audio.
As we build up to London Book Fair, it's interesting to think that maybe it is going to be audio and not AI that dominates the news there. But we will begin with something that combines the two, and that is news from ElevenLabs.
ElevenLabs, of course, is the giant AI-generated voice platform. It generates voices in all kinds of languages and accents, and has earned its multi-billion dollar valuation from partnerships with platforms such as Spotify. This week it has announced another new audiobook-related product. This one is in-house — it's part of the ElevenLabs creative suite, which is open to creators who want to use all the tools at ElevenLabs' disposal to help them use AI-generated voices in their creative work. And it is imaginatively called Audiobooks.
It is aimed squarely at indie authors as well as publishers, and the promise it offers is manuscripts to audiobook in one workflow. Interestingly, it's not just a production tool — it is also a distribution tool. It distributes to ElevenReader, which is ElevenLabs' own audiobook reading app, but it also promises to get books out to other audiobook channels. You get a single dashboard through which you can control where your book is distributed and monitor your sales — all the usual things you would expect from a distribution platform.
So ElevenLabs is entering the audiobook creation marketplace full on, making itself available to indie authors to create and distribute their audiobooks in voices, languages, and accents of their choosing — including, as you can already do through ElevenLabs, a clone of your own voice. You speak to it, it clones your voice, and you can use that to narrate your own audiobooks.
Audible's Immersion Reading — Read and Listen
More audiobook news, this time from Audible. From ElevenLabs we have an end-to-end production and distribution tool. From Audible we have something they're calling immersion reading — which, as someone who works in linguistics, I find myself wanting to call ‘immersive reading.' ‘Immersion reading' feels like two nouns strung together to make a thing. But you get the message. The actual technical name for the feature is Read and Listen, which is a lot clearer.
What this is: a new tool from Audible that means if you as a consumer own both the Audible audiobook and the Kindle ebook, you can switch seamlessly between the two, or use them together. This will no doubt ring a bell — we've seen platforms launch similar things recently. Spotify's Page Match, for instance, allowed you to switch between a physical book and an audiobook. The way it works is that you listen to your audiobook and the ebook reads along with you, highlighting the word currently being read in the audio. This apparently creates an immersion reading experience.
I did have to laugh when Andy Chow, Chief Product Officer at Audible, made it sound like a fabulous new invention, expressing it thus: ‘Now at Audible, you can read with your eyes too.' So there we go — Amazon has just invented reading with your eyes.
This is similar in a way to Audible Captions, except it doesn't do what Audible Captions was going to do — cut down on royalty payments — because this feature requires you to own both. You need to own both the ebook and the audiobook to use it. And Audible's press release is very, very clear on this point. The very last statement says: ‘Publishers will not see changes to related royalty payments.' That is a very important marketing point. They clearly realize just how upset people get when they think they own the rights to the ebook and the audiobook separately, and then find a company collapsing those. They are trying to reassure people that that is not what's happening here.
Mark Williams, however, has — as always — a very interesting and in-depth piece on this that I thoroughly recommend. He talks about what he calls format convergence: the fact that we're used to thinking of print books, ebooks, and audiobooks as separate things, but increasingly companies are merging those experiences. Page Match combined audio and the physical book. Now we have immersion reading.
Mark notes that Audible's reassurance that royalty payments will be unchanged is notable precisely because it was necessary to state. And I think he's taking the view that that's great — but don't expect it to last. Which is probably true. While we would welcome anything that preserves rights for rights holders, it is clear that readers are increasingly expecting to be able to flip between formats and use two formats at the same time. At some point they are going to say: I thought I'd already paid for this thing. They won't quite understand why they need to pay separately for the ebook and the audiobook. I'm just buying a book.
And of course — maybe I'm showing my age here — there's a generation used to buying a CD and being given the right to rip the MP3 at the same time. Buy one, get the other. There is a consumer expectation that you pay once for the creative content, not once per format. For the time being, Audible's immersion reading is allowing rights holders to sell their rights separately and retain royalties on all of them. Whether that continues to be the case remains to be seen.
If I had a crystal ball, I would say I'm pretty sure there will be people at London Book Fair talking about precisely this issue. So do look out for my coverage of that in a couple of weeks' time. In the meanwhile, I'm going to go out and enjoy the sunshine. Thank you very much, and I look forward to speaking to you soon.
