Bonnier's BookBeat launches in UK

BookBeat - a subscription service for streaming audiobooks, part of Swedish company Bonnier Books - has launched in the UK. The soft-launch include titles from HarperCollins and audiobook producer Naxos.

The business, based in Sweden and Finland, says its aim is "to create the best possible service for digital books". It charges a monthly fee of £14.90 for unlimited listening.

In the UK the audiobook download market is dominated by Audible, an Amazon owned audiobook retailer and publisher. It charges £7.99 a month on a book club model whereby users can choose one new audiobook a month, but then also purchase titles separately.

Niclas Sandin, chief executive of BookBeat, told The Bookseller: "We felt that we had enough great books in the service to initiate a soft launch and start testing different types of marketing and get user feedback. At the same time we will continue the discussion with more publishers to extend the catalogue. A broader and more public launch will be made in a couple of months. I cannot disclose that at this moment but there is a handful of UK publishers that offer both their front list and backlist titles in our service. We have ongoing discussions with many more and our goal during the following months and beyond is to offer the best catalogue on the market for an unlimited subscription service, including a wide array of publishers and audiobooks."

Titles to choose from span a broad range of genres: in fiction, classics, crime and thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy and romance; and, in non fiction, history, biographies, business and economics, and personal development; as well as children's and YA. The landing page offers "thousands of audiobooks", featuring Joanna Cannon's The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, Patricia Cornwell's Chaos, Sarah Pinborough's Behind Her Eyes, Brian Cox's Human Universe, Chimanda Ngozi's We Should All Be Feminists, Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, Cecelia Ahern's P.S. I Love You, David Walliams' The Midnight Gang, Michael Morpurgo's War Horse and Private Peaceful, George RR Martin's A Game of Thrones, Cameron Diaz's The Body Book, Jeremy Paxman's A Life in Questions and Max Hasting's The Secret War.

Among "editors' picks" are titles including The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (HarperCollins), Purity by Jonathan Franzen (Fourth Estate), Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld (HarperCollins) and Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (Vintage/ Naxos Audiobooks). 

Customers are currently being offered a two-week free trial on the website, bookbeat.com/uk, promising "no commitments" with the opportunity to cancel subscriptions online at anytime. The site also offers customers gift cards: £14.90 for one month, £39.90 for three months ("value £44.70"), and £75.90 for six months ("value £89.40"). The company is currently recruiting for BookBeat "influencers" and bloggers, asking for reviews of the service and offering a one-year free subscription to BookBeat ("worth £179") to those with between 1,000 and 10,000 followers or readers.

Sandin said BookBeat would now aim to challenge Audible's hold over the UK market, and said the relatively high monthly price point was based on what had worked in other markets. "If you try to offer unlimited books that are both frontlist and backlist at a price level below £10 you are dead on arrival. We are using a price point that is harmonised with our other markets where it has not been an issue with the users as long as you have frontlist content. In the long term we believe this level is sustainable and it will allows us space to continuously acquire and offer great content from the big publishers. We are aiming at the position as the main challenger to the market leader with a different offer where our users anytime, anywhere can listen thousands of books in their smartphone just one tap away.

"In our other markets that has extended the target group and increased the overall consumption of books and we believe that is also possible in the UK. Our learnings from Sweden is that it is always room for more than one player in a growing market."

The subscription based all-you-can-eat model is not uncontroversial in the UK and elsewhere, with the bigger publishers reluctant to sign such contracts for e-books, though some have in the past for their audiobook content. But Sandin said the deal was straightforward for publishers, who are paid on a per title basis and not out of a pool of monies collected. "We offer the publishers the same compensation model as on our other markets. In short that means that we agree on a fixed price or discount for a book and then they get payed based on how many times the book is listened to by all our users. Price multiplied with popularity, it is as easy as that." BookBeat has previously said that an average subscriber listens to between 1.8 and 2.2 books a month.

Sandin told The Bookseller last year the ultimate goal was to build a service that can be used worldwide, dependent on the availability of rights. He said the Swedish business was also inking deals with British publishers to the Swedish platform, and that it intended to push into Germany as part of its 2017 expansion plan. BookBeat also faces competition in its native countries, where the market leader is Storytel.