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Audiobooks Drive Cross-Format Reading

News Summary: Audible’s NielsenIQ Report Finds Audiobooks Drive Cross-Format Reading; Human Narrators Still Matter

Audiobook companies like to publish numbers with two kinds of finding. First, that the audiobook market is expanding. And second that they as a company are responsible for a large amount of the good stuff they have just demonstrated. Spotify has so far been the leader in this field, but Frankfurt Book Fair saw Audible jump headlong into the space with a much-vaunted report commissioned from NielsenIQ that was launched there.
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Smashwords Adds Pre-Orders

News Summary: Smashwords Adds Pre-Orders; Spotify Expands Audiobooks to 180 Countries

Big news from a couple of the big platforms we use to round off the week. First comes a press release from Draft2Digital that brings the announcement that Smashwords will be accepting pre-orders for the first time. For me this brings all kinds of nostalgia. Like many indies who started in the late aughts, well into the internet era but before Kindle, Smashwords was the platform through which I made my first ever sale. I still occasionally wake up with cold sweats about its Meatgrinder (if you know, you know). So it's great to see them still moving forward.
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Speakies Shortlist Features Indie Author

News Summary: Speakies Shortlist Features Indie Author; Spotify Expands Partner Program to 35 New Markets

The Speakies are the newer UK-based relative (technically the British Audio Awards) of the US' Audies Awards, celebrating the best of the year's audiobooks. Like the Audies, the Speakies are open to indie titles, which is why I make sure to spend some time scouring the shortlists and winners when they appear. And this past week the shortlist came out.
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Spotify Opens AI Audiobook Creation Tools

News Summary: Spotify Opens AI Audiobook Creation Tools to All US Indie Authors; Webtoon Launches AI Translation

The big news of the week is Spotify's announcement that it is opening up its AI narration tools for audiobooks to all indie authors in the US. Audiobook Creation Tools was the ElevenLabs collaboration with Spotify that had been in beta. It allows authors to turn their books into audiobooks within their Spotify for Authors account using a selection of ElevenLabs' AI-generated narration voices.
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US Audiobook Sales Grow

News Summary: US Audiobook Sales Grow 9% to $2.43 Billion; Active Titles Up 43% as Revenue per Title Falls

I wrote recently about the 60 percent growth in audiobook listening reported by Spotify in 2025. This week we have figures on the whole of the audiobook market (in the US at least), which help to contextualize that growth. The figures come as the Audio Publishers Association announces the findings of its two annual surveys: hard data on sales from Toluna, and a comprehensive survey on listening habits from Edison Research.
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ElevenLabs Adds 200,000 Human-Narrated Titles

News Summary: ElevenLabs Adds 200,000 Human-Narrated Titles; Readers Can Swap Narrators for AI Voices

This week's second story is less legally dense and full of plot twists than our first. But no less important. At the center of it is ElevenLabs, the AI-generated voice giant. You will recall that ElevenLabs was in the news last week because of its audiobook partnership with Spotify. This week, a reminder that ElevenLabs is, itself, an audiobook platform thanks to its Eleven Reader app.
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Spotify Reports 60% Audiobook Listening Growth

News Summary: Spotify Reports 60% Audiobook Listening Growth; Page Match Feature Drives Engagement

One reason Spotify has been in the news a fair bit of late is that May 21 was its Investor Day. That's the time each year when they make big announcements about the year ahead, such as reported in my earlier post on the ElevenLabs deal. And it's when they look back and highlight the things they are proudest of in the previous year. And that's what I'm looking at today.
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Spotify Launches ElevenLabs-Powered Audiobook Creation Tool

News Summary: Spotify Launches ElevenLabs-Powered Audiobook Creation Tool; Voice Actors Sue AI Companies

Spotify joined up with the AI voice generation platform ElevenLabs last year to allow rights holders who created audiobooks using ElevenLabs to upload those books to Spotify. They have just announced they will be taking this collaboration a step further in a feature that in June will be launched as an invitation-only beta. I'll quote the key sentence from the Investor Day statement on this: "Built directly into Spotify for Authors, and powered by ElevenLabs' digital voice technology, authors can now access seamless audiobook generation and publishing without exclusive contracts."
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OpenAI Shuts Down Sora

News Summary: OpenAI Shuts Down Sora Video Platform; Audible Partners with British Airways

I think I reported on the Sora app when it launched back in October. The app, which enables users to access OpenAI's Sora generative AI platform on their phones to create short video clips, hit the headlines back then for two reasons. In one of the starkest "there's good news and bad news" stories yet to come out of AI, the good news (for OpenAI anyway) was that the launch broke all kinds of records, reaching one million downloads in just five days. That's faster than ChatGPT. In "on the other hand" news, it kind of sucked that people started swamping social media with fake video clips of dead people, like the beloved Robin Williams. And of course, even at the launch the copyright radar was working overtime.
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Audible Launches Cheaper Standard Plan

News Summary: Audible Launches Cheaper Standard Plan to Challenge Spotify’s Audiobook Growth

The recent run of new offerings from audiobook platforms keeps on going. It's reached the stage where even TechCrunch (who are, as the name suggests, more a tech than a publishing outlet) are openly calling this an open battle for market share between Audible and Spotify. And are suggesting that Spotify's remarkable growth in the short time (four years) since they launched their audiobook offering has got Audible flustered.
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