Just Press Play

Fall 2010 News and Notes

      From SaveNYCLibraries.org
The frost is on the pumpkin (so to speak), a parade of Zombie librarians is about to cross the Brooklyn Bridge (really), and 2010 is drawing to a close. I'd thought I'd use this week's post to look at a couple of the year's most-hyped predictions and to present a few items of assorted "news and notes."

Although sales of e-books have been climbing throughout 2010, a number of big announcements from early in the year have yet to be fully delivered upon.

In late September, Blio's long-awaited launch left most observers a bit "underwhelmed". In my opinion, the basic interface is very strong -- as everyone has known it would be since seeing the earliest demos.

But many people were disappointed when the roll-out came considerably later than expected and was at first available for only a single operating system -- Windows.

To make matters worse, the initial title offerings were far fewer in number than had been expected (10,000 titles -- nothing to sneeze at but not nearly what's offered by Amazon or B&N).  And, in some cases, Blio titles were more expensive than the competition.

Reviewers were likewise disappointed by Blio's over-hyped text-to-speech (T2S) capabilities. Unfortunately, it's implementation of T2S fails to improve upon existing robo-talk performance, such as is offered by the Kindle. But anyone expecting narration comparable to a human reader was being naively optimistic.  For visually impaired people, however, the point is not to replace human readers but merely to gain better access to the millions of books that are available only as text.  For these people, Blio T2S will be a major plus.

The real promise of Blio's speech integration is not its current implementation of robot-like synthetic speech but rather its ability to smoothly sync professionally produced audio to the text displayed on screen.  It remains to be seen if publishers will be interested in offering combo e-book/audiobook content (or if consumers will be interested in paying for it), but if the interest is there, Blio provides the capability.

It also remains to be seen how publishers will respond to the software and services for converting to Blio format. Blio seems to be doing all it can to make this process painless, but it's clear that their client software is still evolving, and this is likely to also be the case for their authoring tools.

Lastly, the current Blio business model only addresses consumers. We'll have to wait till next year (at least) to see what Blio intends to do for libraries.

Announced early in 2010 but not yet materialized is Google Editions -- potentially the most game-changing of all e-book developments once it finally gets here. Google denies that the roll-out is dependent on a successful conclusion to the ongoing Google Book Search law suit.  That case isn't about  the sale of brand-new e-book titles to consumers but rather about Google's right to sell access to scanned library editions of so-called "orphan works".   But despite the denials, I'm not aware of any other reasons having been offered for the delay in Google Editions, so I tend to believe that there are connections.

In the meantime, a visit to the service currently known as Google Books gives one a little idea of what's in store. And when the time comes for a full launch of Google Editions, you can bet that the Big G won't make the mistake of rolling it out to only a single OS.

For some clues as to where all this might eventually be heading, I recommend two recent online posts: an interesting overview of the three newest and biggest e-book platforms (Blio, Google Editions, and Copia) by publishing guru Mike Shatzkin; and from Steve Leveen (CEO and co-founder of the Levenger catalog), the most level-headed comparison of print books to e-books that I have yet to come across.

Of course, 2010 was also going to be the year in which we would be flooded with Android tablet devices. Maybe next year.  They are doubtless still coming -- they just haven't gotten here yet. Barnes and Nobles' announcement earlier this week of a $249 Android-based color touchscreen Nook is probably a sign that more inexpensive devices are on their way.

Elsewhere in the news... 

Sony's announcement earlier this week that they were discontinuing production of the cassette Walkman made a lot of people my age stop and think about the first time they ever saw one of these devices and how impressed they were. I think a lot of us were equally surprised to discover that the production halt hadn't occurred already and that they were actually still being made.

This is one more sign that the days are numbered for library collections of audiobooks on cassette. Throughout the year, we've heard from more and more public libraries telling us that they have finally begun intensive weeding of their cassette collections -- or in many cases have eliminated the collections entirely. The shelf space is just too valuable and -- in most communities -- the drop-off in circulation has been very steep. What substitute will libraries offer to older patrons who have been sticking with cassettes? Many are finding that Playaway is an ideal replacement.

 

Gwyneth Jones as seen on YouTube Speaking of libraries and the future, we were delighted to hear school librarian extraordinaire Gwyneth Jones (aka "The Daring Librarian") extolling the many benefits of Playaway on last Sunday's edition of Bob Edwards Weekend from XM Radio and Public Radio International.

Our own marketing department couldn't have offered a more thorough summary of Playaway's benefits for school libraries and classrooms. I also like what Jones had to say about new technology "enhancing but not replacing" older formats -- such as the printed book. And I was highly amused by her pronunciation of "Target" as "Tarjhzay".

If you missed the show, you can listen online to parts one, two, and three of the series "SHHHH... Libraries At Work!" (Gwyneth Jones is featured in Part 3.)

 

 

 

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

Digging Deeper: A Look at 5-Year Audiobook Sales Trends

This past February, Baker and Taylor published a five-year "category trend report" for sales of adult audiobooks. B&T publishes these trend reports periodically, but it only began doing this for the audiobook category in 2010.

The numbers in the report are interesting, but they also leave several key areas unexplored. A few facts that jumped out at me:

• Total audiobook unit sales for the period January 2008 through June 2009 were down 20% compared to the preceding 18 months.

• From January 2004 to June 2009, retail sales as a percentage of total sales declined from 64% to 49%.

What was left out of course were any details about sales of audiobooks in libraries and how they fit in to the five-year trend.

So, using Baker and Taylor's Publisher Alley service, I dug a little deeper. Here's a summary of what I came up with when I looked at the separate numbers for retail sales and sales to public libraries:

A few noteworthy facts:

• From 2005 to 2009, total audiobook sales (through Baker and Taylor) shrank from about $41 million down to about $27 million - more than a 30% decrease.

• Within those totals, the retail share shrank from nearly $28 million to about $12.5 million.

• But during the same period, audiobook sales to public libraries actually experienced a modest increase from about $13 million to almost $15 million. (Actually, sales to libraries peaked at about $16 million in 2007.)

You can see the varying trends of retail vs. public library sales in the following chart (the vertical axis shows unit sales):

Keep in mind these qualifiers:

• These numbers reflect sales of physical formats - principally CD, MP3 CD, and of course Playaway. Not accounted for here is what's happening in the world of audiobook downloads -- both retail (e.g., Audible.com) and in the library world (e.g., OverDrive, NetLibrary, and MyiLibrary).

• The figures are for sales by Baker and Taylor only -- a fraction of the total market. Just how big a fraction is not entirely clear, but most likely B&T has more than 10% and less than 25% of the whole market.

So what do the numbers tell us? Clearly, the audiobook marketplace is changing. It's beyond dispute that retail sales of physical audiobooks have been in a steady decline, although the success of Audible.com suggests that direct-to-consumer downloads may have been picking up much of that slack.

In fact, if we could accurately account for these downloads, it might very well be that overall retail unit sales of audiobooks haven't really declined at all. They may even have grown.

Meanwhile, it seems that audiobook listeners may be turning in increasing numbers to their public libraries in order to get what they want -- that shouldn't come as much of a surprise in challenging economic times. And it's clear that libraries have continued to expand their acquisition of audiobooks in multiple formats, with Playaway and downloadables appearing to grow at the fastest rate.

What's your take on these numbers?  Where do you think the audiobook dollars are going?  Leave a comment.

Off to ALA in Washington, D.C. next week. If you'll be attending, come visit Playaway at Booth #1337.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

Doctorow's Dilemma

"I just flat out love audiobooks," says sci-fi author Cory Doctorow in a recent guest column for Publishers Weekly. He then proceeds to make it abundantly clear that he really means what he says.

It's obvious that Doctorow -- a number of whose novels have been produced as audiobooks and who, for some time, has offered free podcasts of himself reading his own work -- is more than just a casual fan of the audiobook medium. The word "fanatic" comes to mind as one reads his description of how he moved his hundreds of Audible.com titles to a Linux computer by painstakingly playing each file in real time in order to convert it to MP3.

Doctorow's article is interesting and thought provoking, but -- as authors and publishers often do -- he focuses entirely on the retail side of the audiobook world. When he points out that retail sales of audiobooks on CD "are in freefall while digital delivery... is skyrocketing," he fails to consider that audiobooks on CD -- and other physical formats such as MP3-CD and, yes, Playaway -- continue to be hugely popular with public libraries and their patrons.

Doctorow describes the complicated reasons that Little Brother, his 2008 novel for young readers, isn't available on Audible or iTunes. Basically, it seems that he instructed his agent to refuse any deal that would impose Digital Rights Management (DRM) on the end user. Because Random House didn't want to undertake the cost of releasing the title on CD and because he didn't want to accept DRM and end-user license restrictions, Doctorow says that the audiobook edition of Little Brother has been for sale only as a digital download, (and at that, available only direct from Random House Audio).

For Doctorow, agreeing to permit DRM on his creative works amounts to selling his audiobooks "on terms that insist my listeners only use devices approved by a DRM vendor," effectively locking customers in to the vendor's proprietary "ecosystem".

But circumstances are changing, and there are other things going on that Doctorow doesn't mention. According to Amazon and other sources, there will in fact be a retail version of Little Brother on audio CD, available in May 2010.

And Doctorow doesn't mention it, but since 2008, libraries have been able to buy a "library edition" CD of Little Brother from Books on Tape, a division of Random House. According to WorldCat, some 271 libraries have this CD edition in their collection.

Furthermore, public libraries that subscribe to the Overdrive downloadable e-audiobook service can offer their patrons a DRM-free MP3 version of Doctorow's book. Most of Overdrive's e-audiobook titles continue to be available only in WMA format with built-in DRM that makes the content expire at the end of the library borrowing period. Recently, however, a few publishers, Random House Audio among them, have begun to experiment with dropping DRM on selected titles -- even in the library sphere. A title that's on loan is unavailable to other users until the end of the lending period, but unlike the DRM-ed WMA files that make up the majority of the OverDrive collection, the files themselves do not expire and can be easily moved from one device to another. Under the terms of the OverDrive end-user license, users are obliged to delete the files from their devices at the end of the loan period, but essentially this is an honor system.

Even so, the OverDrive arrangement doesn't fully meet all of Doctorow's criteria for seamless access and ease of use. It's still necessary to download and install proprietary OverDrive software in order to acquire the MP3 files, and the system isn't necessarily optimized for use by the blind or physically disabled, who, as Doctorow points out, make up a significant portion of the audiobook audience.

Doctorow is correct that the bottom seems to be falling out of the retail market for audiobooks on CD. But retail demand for downloadable audiobooks is strong, and sales through Audible, iTunes, and others continue to grow, though, so far not to the point of having made up all the way for declining revenue from CD sales. (This despite all those dollars that Doctorow himself appears to have spent at Audible before deciding their end-user license terms were unacceptable to him.)

One result of this is that some audiobook publishers -- especially those that have tended in the past to focus on retail sales and to ignore the library market -- have begun to cut back on the number of audiobook titles they release on CD, sending more and more of them straight into the "digital-only" realm of the download services.

On the retail side, the trend seems to be decidedly away from DRM. Certainly that's the way that music sales have gone, and recent decisions by Random House Audio make it look more likely that audiobook publishers will go the same route as music publishers and make their titles available online DRM-free. But how will this play out for libraries? This is the part that doesn't get talked about much in the DRM debates.

While all this may be fine for devotees of Audible and iTunes, and even for OverDrive users on the library side, it could be leaving out a big middle ground of people who aren't ready to make the leap into downloadables and who still want a convenient physical format. And as many iPod users have been frustrated to discover, their device is compatible with some but not all OverDrive titles. (Not so for the new crop of devices equipped with Google's Android operating system, so the landscape may be changing.)

Fortunately for those folks not willing or able to take advantage of downloadable audiobooks, many titles published as digital-only are now making there way onto Playaway. And for the many library patrons who borrow audiobooks on CD specifically in order to rip them and move them onto an iPod or other portable media player, the Playaway version is also good news -- Playaway titles of course are already loaded onto a portable player, so the CD-rippers can save several steps. And because Playaway is a secure physical format, there's no need for complicated DRM wars.

Doctorow's dilemma still remains, but audiobook listeners who look to their public library as a source for new listening experiences can rest assured that they'll continue to have options. And one of those options will be Playaway.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Sr. Manager for Content Strategy

Book Links article features Playaway / Resources: audiobooks & education

Another great article by the tireless Mary Burkey -- this time an exploration of the future of audiobook formats, in the March issue of Book Links magazine.  The article mentions several advantages of Playaway as a forward-looking format.  Click here for the full text.

In the same issue, Book Links features Mary's excellent bibliography of resources relating to the educational benefits of audiobooks.

And if you want even more references on audiobooks and education (comprehension, literacy, language-learning, etc.) as well as audiobook reader's advisory resources, take a look at Jessica Moyer's site.

Jessica and I met recently when we shared the stage as part of a lively half-day pre-conference workshop on audiobooks at the joint Kansas Library Association / Mountain Plains Library Association annual conference in Wichita.  The event was interesting and a lot of fun, and Jessica, who holds an MLIS degree and is currently a PhD candidate in Education, provided a valuable research-oriented perspective to the subject of audiobooks.   

That so much interesting research and discussion is beginning to emerge is another sign, I think, that audiobooks are coming into their own as a medium.