Good e-Reader Radio

Kobo has just launched an audiobook bookstore that sells audiobooks individually and also provides them on a subscription level basis. Their entire audiobook catalog is powered by Overdrive and this is the first time they have ever been involved in an audiobook subscription scheme.

Kobo Audiobooks will cost $12.99 per month in Canada and comes with a 30-day free trial period. Customers will get one credit a month with their subscription and they can be redeemed for any audiobook title on the platform. You can also purchase Kobo Audiobooks individually and shop with confidence with their Price Match Guarantee.  In addition, readers earn Kobo Super Points on their monthly subscription fees or audiobook purchases. The Kobo audiobooks service is available today in the US for ($9.99/mo), the UK (£6.99/mo), Australia ($12.99/mo), and New Zealand ($13.99/mo).

Kobo has updated their app for Android and iOS and have brought over a fully functional audiobook player. You can make purchases and listen to your content on Android, and with iOS you can only listen to titles you have already bought or have used a credit on. You cannot make purchases directly on your iPhone or iPad.

“We have more books than time, always. Audiobooks let our readers fit the books they love into more parts of their day,” says Michael Tamblyn, CEO, Rakuten Kobo Inc. “Audio lets you be in two places at once—exploring the galaxy on the daily commute, solving a crime while doing the laundry, or wherever you want your favourite story to take you.”

Tamblyn continues: “Last year, we built the Kobo Aura ONE eReader with the help of our best customers, and our new offering is no different. What we unequivocally heard was that they wanted the best deal on audiobooks, and we are pleased to offer the lowest subscription price available.”

Over the course of the past three years the highest growing segment of publishing are audiobooks. The global audiobook industry is currently evaluated at $3.5 billion dollars and the United States is currently the largest singular market with $1.8 billion dollars in audio sales in 2016 and this was a 31% increase from 2015. The Audio Publishers of America has stated that every year for the past three years 36,000 audiobooks were issued. When it comes right down to it, the retailers are the ones who benefit from the audiobook revolution. The vast majority of the companies that spoke to Good e-Reader have disclosed that they have seen triple digit growth and expect this trend to continue into 2017.

Michele Cobb, executive director of the Audio Publishers Association, pointed to the “significant” increase in units and dollars that audio has seen in the past few years; the tremendous popularity of podcasts; and referenced association surveys. Surprisingly, frequent listeners – of at least four audiobooks a month – skew 56% male.

I am really happy that Kobo has leveraged their sister company to provide an audiobook solution for their customers. I predicted last year that Kobo would open up an audiobook store and even cited their relationship with Overdrive as the digital content provider. I feel audiobooks was the missing piece to the Kobo ecosystem and this could provide a lucrative stream of revenue for years to come.

The Good e-Reader Radio Show is back from a long hiatus with a very special edition, music to read to. Over the course of the next hour you will be introduced to a symphonic serenade of new music, including electronica, jazz and soul. This is the perfect soundtrack to crack open your favorite book and listen to this show in the background.

All of the music played on this radio show you will not find on the top 40! This are tunes that you will likely not of heard of before, which makes it a very compelling listen. If you dig what you hear, drop a comment below.

The Good e-Reader Radio Show is back from a long hiatus with a very special edition, music to read to. Over the course of the next hour you will be introduced to a symphonic serenade of new music, including electronica, jazz and soul. This is the perfect soundtrack to crack open your favorite book and listen to this show in the background.

All of the music played on this radio show you will not find on the top 40! This are tunes that you will likely not of heard of before, which makes it a very compelling listen. If you dig what you hear, drop a comment below.

Michael Kozlowski( Editor in Chief )Michael Kozlowski has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past twelve years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

goodereader.com/blog/

Welcome to another installment of the Good e-Reader Radio Show! Today we are talking about the health benefits of e-books, something normally people do not associate with an entertainment product. Today, we talk about the reasons why e-books are better for you if your recovering from an injury or if you have vision disorders, while citing specific examples. Additionally, we talk about some of the drawbacks when you read on a tablet or smartphone.

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Welcome to another installment of the Good e-Reader Radio Show! Today we are talking about the health benefits of e-books, something normally people do not associate with an entertainment product. Today, we talk about the reasons why e-books are better for you if your recovering from an injury or if you have vision disorders, while citing specific examples. Additionally, we talk about some of the drawbacks when you read on a tablet or smartphone.

Michael Kozlowski( Editor in Chief )Michael Kozlowski has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past twelve years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

goodereader.com/blog/

e-Reader innovation has ground to a halt and no new technology has been developed since 2013. This was the worst year on record in terms of overall sales. Many analysts have proclaimed that only 9 million units have shipped this year, which is a decrease from the 12 million dedicated e-ink devices were sold in 2014 and a far cry from 20 million units that were sold in 2011.

The e-reader industry is crashing

There are many reasons why major companies like Amazon and Barnes and Noble only shipped one new e-reader this year and Kobo debuted two new models. It is the same reason why there were no new 13.3 inch e-readers in 2015, although Onyx and Pocketbook both teased they had one in development, but they are nowhere to be found.

I think the main reason why the e-reader industry is in a state of decline is due to the market becoming super saturated between 2009 to 2012. Basically anyone who wanted an e-reader went out and bought one during that time frame.  There is little reason to invest in a new model every year, because there is no quantum leaps in technology, its been utterly stagnant.

The second reason is primarily attributed to e-Reader ownership hitting an all time low. Pew Research conducted a study and found 19% of adults reported owning an e-reader, such as a Kindle or Nook.This is a sizable drop from early 2014, when 32% of adults owned this type of device. It seems as though people have shelved their readers and switched to smartphones and tablets.

Pew found that 45% of U.S. adults own a tablet – a substantial increase since they began measuring tablet ownership in 2010. Then, only 4% of adults in the U.S. were tablet owners. They also stated that 68% of adults now have a smartphone, nearly double from 2011 when only 35% of adults had a smartphone.

The Wall Street Journal also reported this summer that the smartphone continued to be the most adopted piece of technology to read e-books. Their premise derived from a recent Nielsen survey of 2,000 people who found  54% of e-book buyers said they used smartphones to read their books at least some of the time, which is a 24% increase from 2012.

There are only a few e-reader companies left standing

When Good e-Reader first started reporting on the rise of e-readers and e-books in 2008, the world was great. Within a few short years there were dozens of e-reader and e-paper companies looking to make their mark on the industry.

In 2015 there are only a few companies left standing. The only company who is active in e-paper is E-Ink Holdings.  Pixel QI, LG and Bridgestone all abandoned their e-paper ambitions a few years ago due the perceived lack of demand.  Meanwhile in the e-reader sector dozens of companies went out of business in the last few years, such as Cool-ER, Entourage, Hanvon, iRex, Greenbook, Spring Design, Kyobo and dozens of others.

There are only two major companies left standing in the e-reader space and against all odds they have managed to flourish.. Amazon has the largest market share and they account for 75% of all e-books sold in the US, while in the UK the figure is closer to 95%.

The second major global player has to be Kobo. The company has been on an expanding rampage, trying to dominate markets before Amazon can swoop in. One of their biggest secrets to their success is getting their devices in bookstores, where their prospective customers are. Michael Tamblyn – CEO of Kobo told me on a few occasions that they focus on bookstores because their product seems more organic and wholesome, instead of being sold at a big box retailer, where technology is often cold and impersonal. 

What is an e-reader discussion without the Barnes and Noble Nook?  The company released a new waterproof e-reader this year, the first new model since 2013.

Barnes and Noble has lost money on the Nook aspect for the last four years straight. In total, they have lost over 1.2 billion dollars on having too much inventory and selling too few units. They thought they could solve this problem by contracting out the tablet design to Samsung.

The main problem with the largest bookstore chain in the United States is they utterly refuse to enter into new markets and sell digital content. This not only hurts them, but leaves some of their customers in a quagmire. For example, digital library distributor Overdrive sources their digital magazine collection and student newspapers from from Barnes and Noble. Because B&N only sells it in the US, it limits Overdrives capability to sell this kind of content in other markets. It also forces them to find another partner just to sell magazines in countries like Canada or the United Kingdom.

While Amazon and Kobo dominated the global stage, there are only a handful of key regional players that have any sort of sales record and established customer base.  One of the most well known is Tolino, which comprises of an alliance of telecom and tech companies that wanted to develop e-readers and open a digital bookstore to prevent Amazon from dominating the German market. Netherlands based Icarus has a fond place in geeks hearts because they were one of the first ones to develop open Android based e-readers, that allow you to install apps just like you would on a smartphone and tablet. Pocketbook tends to dominate Eastern Europe, while Energy Sistem does well in Spain and finally Onyx Boox who primarily focuses on the lucrative Chinese market.

2016 will be better

I am hoping there will be a number of new technologies that will debut in 2016, that will help revitalize the e-reader industry.

In June 2015 Freescale announced the IMX 7 dual core processor, which will be incorporated into most new e-readers in 2016. This chip was designed by both e Ink and Freescale.  It was chiefly developed to give you a better experience using Carta, Regal or Pearl screens, but was primarily made for whatever new e-paper tech e-ink comes out with in 2016.

E-Ink should also announce Regal 2 in 2016, which will work in conjunction with the new Freescale processor. It will finally make Android driven e-readers more viable because refreshing speed will be increased by a few hundred percent, which will make complex animations, such as animated page turns more viable. Look for this to be announced at SID Display Week.

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e-Reader innovation has ground to a halt and no new technology has been developed since 2013. This was the worst year on record in terms of overall sales. Many analysts have proclaimed that only 9 million units have shipped this year, which is a decrease from the 12 million dedicated e-ink devices were sold in 2014 and a far cry from 20 million units that were sold in 2011.

The e-reader industry is crashing

There are many reasons why major companies like Amazon and Barnes and Noble only shipped one new e-reader this year and Kobo debuted two new models. It is the same reason why there were no new 13.3 inch e-readers in 2015, although Onyx and Pocketbook both teased they had one in development, but they are nowhere to be found.

I think the main reason why the e-reader industry is in a state of decline is due to the market becoming super saturated between 2009 to 2012. Basically anyone who wanted an e-reader went out and bought one during that time frame.  There is little reason to invest in a new model every year, because there is no quantum leaps in technology, its been utterly stagnant.

The second reason is primarily attributed to e-Reader ownership hitting an all time low. Pew Research conducted a study and found 19% of adults reported owning an e-reader, such as a Kindle or Nook.This is a sizable drop from early 2014, when 32% of adults owned this type of device. It seems as though people have shelved their readers and switched to smartphones and tablets.

Pew found that 45% of U.S. adults own a tablet – a substantial increase since they began measuring tablet ownership in 2010. Then, only 4% of adults in the U.S. were tablet owners. They also stated that 68% of adults now have a smartphone, nearly double from 2011 when only 35% of adults had a smartphone.

The Wall Street Journal also reported this summer that the smartphone continued to be the most adopted piece of technology to read e-books. Their premise derived from a recent Nielsen survey of 2,000 people who found  54% of e-book buyers said they used smartphones to read their books at least some of the time, which is a 24% increase from 2012.

There are only a few e-reader companies left standing

When Good e-Reader first started reporting on the rise of e-readers and e-books in 2008, the world was great. Within a few short years there were dozens of e-reader and e-paper companies looking to make their mark on the industry.

In 2015 there are only a few companies left standing. The only company who is active in e-paper is E-Ink Holdings.  Pixel QI, LG and Bridgestone all abandoned their e-paper ambitions a few years ago due the perceived lack of demand.  Meanwhile in the e-reader sector dozens of companies went out of business in the last few years, such as Cool-ER, Entourage, Hanvon, iRex, Greenbook, Spring Design, Kyobo and dozens of others.

Audiobooks are the fastest growing segment in publishing and everyone within the industry is very bullish about the future of the format.  There are a number of new start-ups that are making waves and retailers are beginning to release that audiobooks are worth investing in.

The global audiobook industry is currently evaluated at 2.8 billion dollars and this is primarily due to the sheer amount of new titles that were produced in 2015. 43,000 new audiobooks were released this year, which is a slight increase from the 36,000 that came out in 2014 and a far cry from the 20,000 that were issued in 2013.

According to a recent report by the American Association of publishers downloaded audio had the highest growth in the first eight months of 2015. The number of audiobooks sold  increased 43.3% in August, compared to August 2014. This brings the year-to-date growth for this format to 37.8%, compared to the same timeframe in 2014.

Since the industry is generating so much revenue many companies that specialize in statistics are beginning to pay attention. For the first time audiobook and audiobook subscription services are being tracked by Nielsen StatShot.  20 publishers proclaimed that the subscription model for audiobooks are actually proving to be more lucrative than e-Books. Approximately 3.88 million audiobooks were downloaded in 2015 compared to the 2.47 million eBooks that were read.

New Digital Distribution Models

Publishers are willing to experiment with different models for audiobook distribution because they don’t abide by the same agency model that applies to e-books. Companies like Blackstone Audio, Gildan Media, Hachette Audio, HarperAudio, and Naxos Audiobooks have all committed themselves to audiobook subscription services and bundling.

Scholastic is one company that has been at the forefront of embracing alternative distribution methods and are willing to take risks. The company currently has over 400 audiobook titles, which is an overall increase by 32% over 2014. One of the big reasons why their catalog has grown is because production costs have decreased by over 50% since 2009.The audio editions that have proven to be the most popular in 2015 were movie driven titles such as the Hunger Games and Goosebumps series.

Linda Lee, VP, Publisher Scholastic Audio told me that "The traditional audio customer will find your titles wherever you offer them, however, many of these non-traditional distribution models are targeted to the non-traditional audio user and/or customers who have never listened to an audiobook before.  The hope is that through a subscription or bundling model, a non-audio user will be enticed to try and audio and become a convert.  Additionally, these types of models offer the chance to ‘sample’ your product – I.e. Offering the first few titles in a series – hoping to hook the customer, who will then go to a more traditional full price model to find subsequent titles in the series once they are hooked. "

The Audiobook Subscription model

It is hard to have a conversation about companies involved in the unlimited audiobook space and not talk about Amazon. Their Kindle Unlimited platform features over 2,500 audiobooks, which is fairly paltry compared to their competition, but they have made it work.

Kindle Unlimited has only been available for a full year, but the company already commands the largest market share. A survey report from Peter Hildick-Smith's Codex Group confirmed they have more subscribers than any other company.

The report also showed that Amazon's subscriber base grew by 10% between November 2014 and April 2015, while the customer base of its smaller competitors fell by an average of 30% over the same period.

Scribd originally launched as a document sharing service almost a decade ago and was one of the first companies that got into the unlimited e-book subscription space. In 2014 the company got bullish about audiobooks and they ironed out an agreement with Findaway to include over 30,000 titles. They expanded their catalog in April of 2015 when they started dealing directly with major publishers.

VP of Content Acquisition Andrew Weinstein. said that in Scribd's first year of offering audiobooks, users logged more than 270,000 hours using the companies apps for Android and iOS.

The big problem with Scribd is that their audiobook program was too popular and it failed to generate a profit.  This prompted them to pivot from unlimited listening plan to allowing their subscribers to access to a single audiobook title every month and if they wanted to listen to more, they had to pay extra.

"Our goal is to connect readers to books in a meaningful and sustainable way," said Andrew Weinstein in an exclusive interview with Good e-Reader. "We forged new ground when we created Scribd, and innovation often requires iteration. We made adjustments to our business model in order to ensure we could continue to deliver a great value to our subscribers and be a long-term partner to publishers."

"When we launched the Scribd subscription service, we were entering uncharted waters, and we bore the risk with the contract terms.Two years in, we’ve proven that there is true consumer demand for a reading subscription service. Likewise, we’ve shown that Scribd is a strong partner to publishers. We are open to future iterations of the model provided we reach terms with publishers that are both fair to their authors and Scribd." she said.

Playster is the newest entrant in the US market that has just launched a new unlimited service. Unlike their contemporaries they have numerous tiers that give you access to e-books or audiobooks, or you can sign up for their premium package and get access to everything. Their catalog currently features 250,000 e-Books, and more than 60,000 audiobooks.

The CEO of Playster Phil Keezer told Good e-Reader why his company got involved in audiobooks in the first place “Audiobooks were always appealing to us, but we were further buoyed by the fact other subscription services had begun to introduce credit systems for audiobooks. This provided an opportunity for us to give our members a better deal than they’d get elsewhere.” He went on to say “The popularity of audiobooks has seen a tremendous growth over the past couple of years, due to how great they are for multi-taskers. Audiobooks have become the soundtrack to people’s activities. In the past year it seems more and more books have been getting audiobook counterparts.

In order for audiobooks to grow further in 2016 Phil had some interesting thoughts “It would be great to see bigger name actors and narrators with larger followings – I think this will help audiobooks to grow further. Better production value will also help to blur the lines between audiobooks and other media types such as movies and music, which is hugely exciting. Audiobooks have the potential for great achievements within the next year, and it’s great that they’re already getting recognition through awards and accreditations.”

“New features could also make audiobooks more immersive. Synchronization between audiobooks and their e-book counterparts is one example that we’re already seeing, and in the future we could even have listeners choosing their own endings using spoken feedback. Audiobooks with animated qualities tend to be very successful, and while we don’t believe these bells and whistles are always necessary, they will certainly help to make the medium more powerful.”

Audiobooks.com does not have an unlimited subscription model but they have been in the business for a really long time. This has afforded them a unique prospective on the inner workings of the industry and recently GM Ian Small sat down with Good e-Reader for an exclusive interview. “I’m a big champion of the unlimited audiobook model. There are many stakeholders involved with audiobooks – Authors, narrators, publishers, customers, and retailers so it’s going to take some time (and obviously trial and error) to find a model that works for all parties involved. But it is becoming more commonplace for the consumer to enjoy their digital media in this capacity. There are perceptions of other industries that are currently using the “all you can eat” model and that it has not worked out favorably for all parties involved (see the music studios). So I understand the reluctance to completely dive in and deviate from existing retail models. It’s going to take some time and a little tweaking to get it right for audiobooks.”

Ian than alluded to his company’s future plans in the subscription audiobook space “We’re trying to find a model that can expand the market and lower the barrier for consumers to enjoy audiobooks while trying to avoid mistakes that have happened in other markets and their rights holders. It’s a learning process (albeit an expensive one) to figure out what doesn’t work, and then build on what does.”

I think the concept of subscription audiobooks will be slowly refined in 2016, companies like Findaway are looking to limit the amount of risk that retailers. I have heard they are going to be developing new tools and features that will monitor budgets and insure that companies will not spend more than they are financially able.

In this audiobook trends and analysis report I have made reference or will make reference to a company named Findaway. This is likely the largest company involved in the audiobook sector with a catalog of over 100,000 titles and they deal with over 200 publishers. They do not sell audio content directly to consumers, but they offer a powerful API system that retailers all over the world employ to sell audiobooks directly to users, your local library or non-conventional distribution models such as bundling or unlimited subscriptions.  You might not heard of them, but their client list is very extensive.  Findaway powers the collections of Scribd, Playster, BITLIT,...

Audiobooks are the fastest growing segment in publishing and everyone within the industry is very bullish about the future of the format.  There are a number of new start-ups that are making waves and retailers are beginning to release that audiobooks are worth investing in.

The global audiobook industry is currently evaluated at 2.8 billion dollars and this is primarily due to the sheer amount of new titles that were produced in 2015. 43,000 new audiobooks were released this year, which is a slight increase from the 36,000 that came out in 2014 and a far cry from the 20,000 that were issued in 2013.

According to a recent report by the American Association of publishers downloaded audio had the highest growth in the first eight months of 2015. The number of audiobooks sold  increased 43.3% in August, compared to August 2014. This brings the year-to-date growth for this format to 37.8%, compared to the same timeframe in 2014.

Since the industry is generating so much revenue many companies that specialize in statistics are beginning to pay attention. For the first time audiobook and audiobook subscription services are being tracked by Nielsen StatShot.  20 publishers proclaimed that the subscription model for audiobooks are actually proving to be more lucrative than e-Books. Approximately 3.88 million audiobooks were downloaded in 2015 compared to the 2.47 million eBooks that were read.

New Digital Distribution Models

Publishers are willing to experiment with different models for audiobook distribution because they don’t abide by the same agency model that applies to e-books. Companies like Blackstone Audio, Gildan Media, Hachette Audio, HarperAudio, and Naxos Audiobooks have all committed themselves to audiobook subscription services and bundling.

Scholastic is one company that has been at the forefront of embracing alternative distribution methods and are willing to take risks. The company currently has over 400 audiobook titles, which is an overall increase by 32% over 2014. One of the big reasons why their catalog has grown is because production costs have decreased by over 50% since 2009.The audio editions that have proven to be the most popular in 2015 were movie driven titles such as the Hunger Games and Goosebumps series.

Linda Lee, VP, Publisher Scholastic Audio told me that “The traditional audio customer will find your titles wherever you offer them, however, many of these non-traditional distribution models are targeted to the non-traditional audio user and/or customers who have never listened to an audiobook before.  The hope is that through a subscription or bundling model, a non-audio user will be enticed to try and audio and become a convert.  Additionally, these types of models offer the chance to ‘sample’ your product – I.e. Offering the first few titles in a series – hoping to hook the customer, who will then go to a more traditional full price model to find subsequent titles in the series once they are hooked. ”

The Audiobook Subscription model

It is hard to have a conversation about companies involved in the unlimited audiobook space and not talk about Amazon. Their Kindle Unlimited platform features over 2,500 audiobooks, which is fairly paltry compared to their competition, but they have made it work.

Kindle Unlimited has only been available for a full year, but the company already commands the largest market share. A survey report from Peter Hildick-Smith’s Codex Group confirmed they have more subscribers than any other company.

The report also showed that Amazon’s subscriber base grew by 10% between November 2014 and April 2015, while the customer base of its smaller competitors fell by an average of 30% over the same period.

Scribd originally launched as a document sharing service almost a decade ago and was one of the first companies that got into the unlimited e-book subscription space. In 2014 the company got bullish about audiobooks and they ironed out an agreement wi[...]

One of the most common questions people have with e-readers and e-books is the exact number of pages are inconsistent with the print edition. This is primarily due to the fact that e-books don't have "pages" in the usual sense. Anytime you see a mention of e-book pagecount, it's an abstraction. Sort of like if I told you something was an hour's walk away.

The "page count" on e-readers is based on an arbitrary metric and may vary across platforms. It is not set by the publisher, so it will differ from the print edition.

Page counts and line-spacing are basically non-standardized. Some e-Book platforms may count 250 consecutive words as a "page", while others may use a different metric. Some also exclude front and back matter, dedications, acknowledgments, author bios, and other non-relevant content. No one actually knows what any single metric is, but there are some approximations being thrown around.

The big problem with e-book page numbers being different than printed books is due to software that packages EPUBS. Adobe has a different system for anyone using their Digital Publishing solution than a big publisher that uses in-house tools based on best practices by the IDPF. The other problem is that companies like B&N and Kobo have different way to show progress in a book. Sometimes they will show you how many hours are remaining and in other cases page numbers are based on the chapter you are reading.

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