GoodReads is a social media platform where you can form bookclubs and discuss upcoming titles with your friends. Amazon has made it really easy to export all of the titles you purchased on your Kindle directly to GoodReads and this helps you keep better track of the books you are in the process of reading. One of the big failures with Amazon and GoodReads is the inability to easy add all of the audiobooks you purchased from Audible.
Amazon owns both GoodReads and Audible and the big focus on digital content right now are e-books. I don’t think Amazon should discount adding an audiobook export system to Audible, simply because this is the one product category that has not slowed down in the last few years.
The global audiobook industry is currently evaluated at 2.8 billion dollars and this is primarily due to the sheer amount of new titles that were produced in 2015. 43,000 new audiobooks were released last year, which is a slight increase from the 36,000 that came out in 2014 and a far cry from the 20,000 that were issued in 2013.
According to a recent report by the American Association of publishers downloaded audio had the highest growth in the first eight months of 2015. The number of audiobooks sold increased 43.3% in August, compared to August 2014. This brings the year-to-date growth for this format to 37.8%, compared to the same timeframe in 2014.
Audible accounts for the vast majority of global audio sales and most of them are sold directly within their apps. Additionally Audible has a longterm distribution agreement with Apple. Whenever you purchase an audio edition on iTunes or iBooks, the content basically is just coming from Audible.
I think its important to maintain the growth of the digital audio industry and having more synergy between audiobooks and GoodReads is essential. I hope that Audible can simply just leverage the existing GoodReads API to add the ability to export your collection so your friends can checkout not only what your are reading, but what you are listening to.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
