That's the dek of
this article, which doesn't really provide (to my mind) convincing enough statistics to back it up. But perhaps it provides fodder for an interesting thread discussion.
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When I called Audible, Amazon’s audiobook subsidiary, the company crunched the numbers and found examples of books in every imaginable genre that sell better as spoken than written words — sometimes four times as well. (Characteristically reticent Amazon declined to give exact sales figures across formats.)
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The fact that audiobook narrators have developed the followings and star power to drive sales represents a seismic shift in the way books are sold and consumed, said Donald Katz, Audible’s CEO. “This is a completely different phenomenon — a cultural and, frankly, aesthetic change in people’s habits,” Katz said.
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The rise of audiobooks isn’t just about the quality of the performance but the fact that many readers prefer the experience to text. “For a long time the industry treated audiobooks as a subsidiary format, but now we’re seeing it’s become a primary format for many — and has been for some time,” Kaufman said.
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