Over the past 15 years, this market has undergone a remarkable transformation. If the children's audiobook has always existed, what has really changed in the past 4 years is the great boom in the development of products that target adults. With the development of smartphones, platforms and the use of listening thanks to podcasts, the audio book has become more easily accessible. It has further developed thanks to the confinements. Overall, we are driven by an increasingly wide sound offer.

Uses are intensifying and users are getting younger. 55% of listeners are now men, are 39 years old on average, almost 10 years younger than the average age of readers of printed books. Audio books are mainly listened to on a smartphone and at home, either in addition to another activity, particularly manual, or to take a moment for yourself.

The audio book sector is still relatively unknown; there is therefore an issue of notoriety of use. It must also fight against a certain number of prejudices to earn its letters of nobility and assert itself as a book in its own right. But the main challenge is to develop catalogs to better reflect the offer found in bookstores and distribute them on all platforms in order to reach the widest audience. We are also very committed to maintaining a professional quality of recording and sound, which differentiates us a lot from free platforms. The work of the studios and the actors is essential to arouse emotion in the listener or allow him to learn.

It's a changing market, with the arrival in France of book streaming platforms. In the coming years, there are going to be more and more ways to access the audiobook. In the United States, synthetic voices developed by artificial intelligence are also emerging. These are other developments that we may have to deal with. At Audiolib, we will continue to test new segments and different centers of interest, in line with demand, in order to remain the leading publisher of audio books in France – excluding children.