The good old library was there like the chickens on Monday evening. Immediately after the broadcast of news hour, in which the winner of the Libris Literature Prize 2022 was announced, the following announcement appeared on Twitter: ‘The winning book worm moon #Librisliteratuurprijs can be borrowed as an audiobook from the online Library. Read by Mariken Heitman himself.’ I took the fact that the Library referred to the audiobook and not to the e-book or paper book as a vicious reference to the new audio platform ‘Whisper’, a collaboration between three Dutch publishing groups, the Libris booksellers, DPG Media and investor Veronica Ventures. the arrival of which had been announced in the media a few hours earlier. The real reason turned out to be more pragmatic: the Library has worm moon simply not as an e-book in the range.
Although Mariken Heitman has a fine voice, I find it more enjoyable to read myself than to be read to. But if I have to believe the numbers, I belong to a dwindling group. Listening is on the rise. 11 percent of the Dutch population listened to one or more audiobooks in the past year and that percentage is growing rapidly. An equally fast-growing number of users are not purchasing their e- and audiobooks individually, but are acquiring them via subscription, via Kobo Plus, Storytel or Podimo. Whisper – the name is so bad that it might be a genius again – uses the so-called †all you can read’ model: for a fixed monthly fee (€12.99) you get access to podcasts and to all the e- and audiobooks you want.
All e- and audiobooks? No: only those of the participating publishers. These are in any case those of the shareholders WPG (the parent group of De Bezige Bij); VBK (which includes Atlas Contact and Ambo Anthos) and Singel Publishers (Arbeiderspers, Querido, Athenaeum, Nijgh & Van Ditmar). Whisper expects that eventually all Dutch publishers will join in, but Prometheus, the publisher of bestselling author Lale Gül, for example, told me when asked that ‘there are no plans for this yet’. So that’s still a thing.
Not a thing but a Thing is the payment of writers and translators. Everyone has considered it normal for years that they have much less left over from their paper brainchildren than the publisher and bookstore, but with the subscription models – which apparently form the future – their earnings are even more lazy. You may hope that authors will realize how ridiculous it is that all kinds of commercial parties earn more from their books than themselves, and start asking more money for their goods in new contracts. This is the time. The beech in it!