I was recently asked how long we have had the electronic audiobooks in CloudLibrary for, as someone was discovering them for the first time. I didn’t like that I had to tell them we have had eaudios for well more than a decade now, and since 2018 they have been in with the ebooks in our CloudLibrary app. The patron didn’t seem upset that they were just discovering something they thought was new that had been around awhile, but the conversation did make me think about how much has changed in the audiobook industry ever since I became a library assistant twenty years ago.
Who remembers “books on tape?” When I first started working at the library all those years ago, books on tape were the popular things to listen to audiobooks on. Most cars had the tape player still, and many homes had players of one kind or another in different rooms of their homes. There was no Bluetooth, no Audible, no audio, just books on tape where you would try not to crash going down the road, flipping the tape over to the b side to hear the next part. My second car automatically flipped the tape without you having to do anything. I thought I was in heaven as it lessened the chance of a tape-changing crash in half!
Around the time cars started having CD players inside of them is the time we also started to see the audiobook industry change towards that new medium. For a while, we could purchase titles in both books on tape and books on CD. After a few years of the dual publication, the audiobook publishing industry began to drop the books on tape as more people didn’t have the ability to play them, and as an effect, they sold many fewer copies than they once did. Books on CD have been the dominant source of audiobooks for most of the last decade and a half and, as such, had a hold on the market.
That is until ebooks became very popular, and eAudios came right after that. For purchasing purposes, we are starting to see that natural transition from books on CD to eaudios as a sign of the future. You will be hard-pressed to buy a new car now with even the possibility of putting a CD player in it, and many homes have switched to Bluetooth speakers, which can play anything on your phone, including audiobooks. While that change is occurring, the library system’s plan is to continue ordering in both formats as long as we possibly can, as we did with the books on tape to books on CD transition. However, we have seen an escalation in that change in 2024 as one of the major audiobook publishing companies that have a high volume of very popular authors announced on January 1st this year that they will no longer produce or sell physical books on CD. We are starting to have to tell patrons who are used to hearing their popular authors that it will be eaudio only for them from now on. I just had this conversation with library staff about a patron request this week. Now that the first publishing company has made the move, we fully expect the other bigger publishing companies to follow over the next couple of years. Eventually, we will make the difficult decision (or the publishing company will make it for us!) to discontinue buying books on CD. We aren’t there yet, but as I mentioned above, it’s always in a little bit of transition!
Finally, I wanted to give you a look into what goes through my mind when purchasing audiobooks. First, I check a report that shows high hold lists from previous recent purchases to ensure they stay below our copy-to-ratio hold limit. Once they are included, I look at the lovely list of all the new popular things that come out each week. It can be items around a specific time of year, like a holiday. These lists will also have popular author’s latest work to make it easier to find while also displaying some first time authors on the list that they think will be popular. They make a fiction and non-fiction list for the eaudios, and then I just go through and select the titles I think would be of most interest to our listeners following trends we see in the library as well as take into account the patron suggestions from our online form to see if they are available in eaudio format. To wrap it all up, I pare down the growing mountain of a list of things I want to buy if money were no object and get it down to our weekly spending amount!
Electronic audiobooks are the wave of now, and into the future until the next technological development pops up, that will change the publishing industry with new things. Really, for years, no one ever thought CDs would become as dominant as they were and kill off the books on tape. The same can now be said about what is happening to the book on CD. The great thing with technology is that it is always changing and the Adams County Library will always be along for the ride.
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