Audio 'booming' with 13% growth last year

Audiobooks are the fastest growing publishing format with 13% growth in 2018, according to Nielsen BookScan. 

Revealing the figures at The London Book Fair’s Quantum Conference, Nielsen said the audiobook boom is continuing with volume up 13% since 2017 and up 87% since 2014.

Audiobooks now account for 5% of all book purchases and have doubled their share of fiction sales. Forty per cent of audio sales are through subscription models, and young men are the biggest audio consumers.
 
Jacks Thomas, director of The London Book Fair, said: “There are so many reasons to be excited about the book market in the UK right now. Audio has been one of the major success stories in publishing over the past five years, and its incredible growth clearly shows no sign of abating.”
 
Overall the print book market held steady in 2018, with a 3% increase in volume, while other areas of the book market saw significant growth, with adult non-fiction up 3% to 40% since 2014 with the quickest growing category being Politics & Government titles with 170% increase (up to 1.8m books in volume). Children’s general non-fiction has grown 30% in 2018, with selling 590,000 more copies than in 2017.