The London Book Fair, Day 2
Day 2 and I am back!
Even more people here today and I think that this might be the main day for visitors coming in from other cities or countries.
The day started out strong with me meeting up with my new found friend Charlie Kirby-Cavell for a brief but lovely talk about audiobooks. I always find it exciting to compare notes on how things tend to work on different markets. Different markets where somewhat different rules apply, but a common ground and core belief in how audiobooks “should” be produced.
After that, I swung by ElevenLab's impressive stand for a brief chat. ElevenLabs is, for anyone who doesn't know, one of the big names in AI, with their clones being available in a lot of different languages.
Quick side note, and maybe not that interesting:
For anyone visiting the area around Hammersmith / Olympia, check out The Melody Restaurant located in St. Paul’s Hotel. Try their lamb. Out of this world.
Anyhow...
After a few meetings, some of which we will hopefully be able to talk more about in the near future, I attended the session “Reading: Reimagined”. It was a talk with speaker Duncan Bruce of Spotify (director of partnerships & licensing).
We learned that Spotify are now operating in 180+ markets across the globe with 290 million paying subscribers.
Duncan says, “Every session is worth it”. This is referencing collaborations they are investing in to stop the bad trends of illiteracy in the UK.
Somethings else that stands out is that half of Spotify’s audiobook listeners are under the age 35 and that 4 in 10 are first time listeners of Audiobooks on their platform.
Some new functions being presented is the possibility to buy physical books through the app in UK and US, Page Match (where you scan your book and the app takes you directly to the matching audio) and Recap, which is another nifty function where you can get a recap up until the point you’ve listened, if you get back to a book that you have put down previously.
It isn’t exactly clear at this point if this works for all markets or just selected ones.
Take away here:
There are a lot of new technical innovations seeing the light of day across all streaming plattforms, be it Storytel or Audible, Bookbeat or Spotify. I love that the heightened competition for listeners has pushed us in that direction. It must be an exciting time for audiobook listeners out there!
That’s day 2 at the fair in the wraps. An amazing day in an even more packed Olympia than yesterday. Me, I still have an evening event to tend to and a - hopefully - lovely dinner to look forward to.
More from me and day 3 tomorrow!
Until then,
Christopher Pålerud