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The articles I've read say audio is a GROWING market as opposed to print, which is flat to trending down. That's a far cry from outselling print. It's easy to believe it's a growing market for a lot of the reasons sited in this thread, including multitasking, libraries carrying more audio books and audible making them more available/cheaper in some cases.
The talk on indie threads is much the same--audio is worth investing in because you can reach some of the same readers, but also a different group of readers. The problem, of course, is that it is very expensive or time consuming to do audio. My husband and I did 3 of my short stories and the opening to Dragons of Wendal (it was originally a stand along short story). The total is one hour of finished audio. The actual HOURS spent on recording and engineering was double that in recording time and triple in engineering. Of course, there was a learning curve and if we decided to do a book, we'd be faster, but if I remember correctly even the industry standard is about 3 times the work (3 hours for every finished hour).
I think it's a great thing to be able to produce audio and offer it and lots of indies are doing it. We did the one hour of stories, but I didn't even try to sell it because it's one hour and it's short stories. I put it up on the blog for free. I've looked for other avenues that would allow me to have audio books, but it's exceedingly expensive (Amazon has the most reasonable plan where you negotiate with the performers. Kobo has a completely pro plan where they essentially partnered with a known outfit that does recording work for other industry publishers--but it's prohibitively expensive.) So it's definitely a growing industry and there is opportunity there. That could mean that prices will come down and that will help growth.
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