Listening reading is no longer just for early adopters, children who cannot yet read for themselves or the visually impaired. More than one in five Dutch people sometimes listen to a book. In recent years, the number of listeners has risen sharply, from 13 to 22 percent of the population in five years. This will also have to do with the much larger offer. You can now have about 18 thousand Dutch-language titles read to you, audio book store Luisterrijk reports. In recent years, in particular, the offer has grown rapidly, with thousands of new releases per year, with a remarkably large jump in 2020.
The first corona year was a good year for audiobooks. Many Dutch people then became acquainted with the phenomenon. To combat the lockdown boredom, the Dutch libraries offered free audio books. This led to absolute records: 2.6 million audiobooks were downloaded from the library servers. Download figures that have not been matched since then, when a library membership was required again. In 2021, libraries lent 2 million audiobooks via the Internet, still many times more than the 171 thousand in 2015.
Renate Rubinstein
The very first Dutch audiobooks were already available in the eighties. Renate Rubinstein engaged her cousin Maurits in 1985 to write her book no do you to include. She was no longer able to read to all her friends herself because of her illness (MS), but she was able to speak once. The fifty cassette tapes, partly for friends and the rest quickly sold out, were the start of Rubinstein publishing house. For twenty years this publisher controlled the largest part of the listening market. About twenty Dutch publishers now publish audiobooks.
The listeners are younger than the paper reader, and remarkably enough, slightly more often male. Paper books are actually more often read by women. The average audio book reader listens on their smartphone for 110 minutes a week, slightly less than the 122 minutes that book readers spend on their hobby every week. Both are dwarfed by the 191 minutes, more than 3 hours, that the e-book reader is glued to the screen per week. Almost all listeners also regularly grab an e-book or paper copy.
Most audiobooks are downloaded for free (and legally, the respondents emphasize), 31 percent of the listeners do this. This is followed by the subscription services, which are springing up like mushrooms. The Netherlands already has seven such providers of podcasts and audiobooks. A subscription gives unlimited access to many titles. If you are no longer a subscriber, the book is gone. Soon there will be added Whisper, a partnership between publishers and bookstores for audiobooks, e-books and podcasts. An even smaller proportion of readers simply want to ‘have’ an audiobook and buy a digital download from a store such as Luisterrijk.
Shortened books
With an average of two hours of listening reading per week, it does take a while before a book is finished. An average audiobook lasts about ten hours, so it will take at least a month before you know how I’m going to live of Lale Gül expires, will be the most listened to in 2021 on subscription service Storytel. Of In Europe by Geert Mak, which lasts 33 hours, is sweet for the average listener for more than four months.
In the past, audiobooks were sometimes shortened, but that was mainly due to the 74 minutes that fit on a CD. Still a shame if CD number 8 only contains a few minutes of book. Today most audiobooks are downloaded, and the voice actor or the author himself almost always reads the entire book. ‘Customers simply want to hear the whole book,’ says Dirkjan van Ittersum of Luisterrijk.
Will no one read an old-fashioned book anymore? It won’t go that fast. First, paper books and e-books are still read a lot more than audio books. But almost all listeners combine audiobooks with paper or ebook books. Also, the advance of the audio book has not yet dented the sales figures of other types of books. In 2021 the sales figures, with 43 million books sold, were even at the highest level in years.
