There has lately been a huge surge in demand for audiobooks. This spike has largely been driven by the digital disruption that not only changes how listeners discover audiobooks, but also how they listen to, create, and purchase them.
As part of BookNet Canada's Tech Forum 2017 conference, we invited a panel of industry professionals to talk about the audiobook landscape, including current trends and future opportunities.
(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)
As we mention in the introduction of this episode, you can watch the video of the panel or see the slides from Noah Genner's consumer data presentation.
Transcript
Ainsley: Welcome to the BookNet Canada podcast. I'm Ainsley Sparkes, and I'll be your host for this month's episode. In March 2017 in Toronto, BookNet Canada ran its yearly Tech Forum conference which focuses on digital developments in the book publishing industry. As the largest tech-focused book publishing event in Canada, Tech Forum provides hundreds of industry professionals a chance to discuss new research, strategies, and advancements in the book industries to help publishers and booksellers better reach their readers, or in this case, listeners. As part of this conference, we invited a panel of industry professionals to talk about the current audiobook landscape. There has lately been a huge surge in demand for audiobooks. This spike has largely been driven by the digital disruption that not only changes how listeners discover audiobooks, but also, how they listen to, create, and purchase them. Our panel talks about current trends and future opportunities.
A quick note, we've removed the presentation by BookNet Canada's president and CEO, Noah Genner, that he delivered at the beginning of this panel. It relied heavily on the slide visuals and didn't translate into the podcast format. You can watch the video of the panel or see his slide deck for the stats provided about audiobook listeners from our consumer research studies. Find the links to those resources in the description of the podcast. And now, I'll turn it over to our panel's moderator, David Caron, co-publisher and president of ECW Press.
David: I'm David Caron. I'm the co-publisher at ECW Press based here in Toronto which I assume, a lot of you I think are here from the GTA. We started doing audiobooks about a year ago which is why they said, "Hey, why don't you moderate this panel?" And we've got a great panel up here to talk about audiobooks. What we're gonna do is we're gonna spend a little bit of time introducing you to each of these fabulous people and they're gonna talk a little bit about what it is that they're doing, and why they're here on the stage. Then we're gonna launch into some discussions around what's going on with audiobooks right now. And then we're gonna go on to you guys and ask you for some questions.
So Cameron Drew from Booktrack. Cameron has always been at the forefront of what's cool and up-and-coming and he still is. He's a 14-year veteran in the online retail and tech startup side of book publishing. Spent six years in global online physical retail fulfillment. That's a good one.
Cameron: I know that's a big mouthful. There we go.
David: Yeah. Five years in the dragon tail days of Kobo, a bittersweet year with Shelfie, and then most, recently two years at Booktrack, helping build the catalogue in ebooks and audiobooks. So Booktrack is moving deeper into audiobooks now and you're fresh from talking with people at that London Book Fair. So tell us about what you've got coming up?
Cameron: Right. Excellent. Thank you. Hello, everyone. So yeah, I start with Booktrack just a couple of years ago. Our initial mission was to find really great stories that we could soundtrack with music and sound effects. That's something that we specialise in. So in that journey of looking to sort of pair reading experiences with listening experiences, we realised that maybe there was another opportunity and certainly all of the partners and publishing partners that we've been speaking to had suggested that, you know, "That's cool, but have you thought about the audiobook space?" And so we looked at that really seriously last year. And, you know, as you do when you're a start-up, you pivot often. And many times what you do is you follow where the trade winds take you. And so we find ourselves in the audiobook space and it's a really exciting time to be here, though it's been around for so long and I actually, you know, I used to sell audiobooks to Nathan back in my Manda days. And I even had met Ian back when, you know, you weren't simply audio. It was like the physical product. But audio and digital is happening. It's happening. It's a really big deal in the U.S. and it's a really big deal in the UK, and other markets, other languages. And so you know, what I'm doing is quite similar. It's just... But looking to add in powerful sound experiences into what's already a listening experience, I think, yeah, yeah.
David: Yeah. Ashleigh Gardner, you may know her from when she was at Dundurn, as manager of digital development. You may know her from her days at Kobo as director of content management. And you may also know her now as the head of partnerships for Wattpad Studios where she's helped manage the Wattpad Stars program which was launched a couple years ago. The program helps Wattpad writers take their skills to the next level and give publishing, and brand partners an opportunity to tap into an international roster of digital influencers. Wattpad recently announced a partnership with Hachette Audio, which is really great, working with Anthony Goff, who's a really great and generous guy in the audiobook world. So tell us more about what you sort of see for Wattpad and Hachette.
Ashleigh: Yeah. So audiobooks are pretty new for us. It's kind of a new space for us to be doing work in audiobooks. I'm really glad that that announcement did come out last week because I was worried that it might get delayed to past this and having very little to talk about. But I think the reason that we started looking at that space as something that we should do more in was first of all, we're seeing a lot of indicators from our users, you know, the whole audiobook space has been blowing up and a lot of that has been due to mobile usage. The fact that people can listen through different apps, through their phone on the go. That's, you know, very complementary to what we see our users do. We were also seeing a lot of people making their own audiobooks on Wattpad and uploading them into places like SoundCloud, like YouTube. We are a user-generated platform and that made our users wanna go to other similar places.
We've done some audiobook experiments in the past, notably SoundCloud, that's also a sister company under Union Square Ventures which is one of our funders. They had launched an API and we were playing with letting our users bring in different soundtracks, including so many of the great songs from their libraries. And, you know, our users being young, being interested in multimedia, really were excited by this early on. So we're really excited about this new partnership as a way to bring more Wattpad stories to a more traditional audiobook reader and to really test out, not just with audiobooks, but what are the other places that we can try to take Wattpad stories too. You know, with Wattpad stories being serialised, it seems like a natural fit for scripted podcasts as well. So we're exploring all of that with Hachette and we're really excited to see what happens this year.
David: Great. I want to... Yeah. We'll come back to it because original audio is a really cool idea, we should come back to later on. So Ruth Linka is one of the most versatile people in publishing I know. She is currently associate publisher at Orca Book Publishers. She began her career in publishing at Coteau Books in Regina. Work for Raincoast Books as the production manager and associate art director. Then NeWest Press in Edmonton as the general manager. And then TouchWood Editions as the publisher. And in the meantime, she co-founded Brindle and Glass in 2001 which was awarded "Emerging Publisher of the Year" at the 2003 Alberta Book Awards. And she serves for the AMVPBC and Victoria Book Prize Society. Lots of stuff. So at Orca, you guys have been at the forefront of promoting literacy, creating books with that in mind, and you're doing that now with enhanced ebooks, enhanced with audio. Can you tell us more about what you're doing within the audiobook world at Orca?
Ruth: So we've been doing audiobooks for quite a while in a more traditional sense. And in the fall, we started doing what we call read-alongs, where the word lights up as the voice speaks it. So you create the audio and then it's married together with the EPUB file, so it's technically an ebook. And we're seeing a lot of success with that, pretty specific, of course, to the kids market. Well, perhaps not, but for us we're just doing it with picture books at the moment. We do have regular audio for our YA and our other literacy readers, for young readers.
David: Great. Ian Small has spent the last five years focusing his skills and strategy in analytics towards guiding a successful launch and growth of audiobooks.com, a subscription-style audiobook service app that's in 150 countries now. And he began his career with Simply Audiobooks, the market leader for the online audiobook CD rental and has 10 years of leadership experience in the audiobook industry. And audiobooks.com just recently underwent a reorg, basically splitting itself. Novel Audio became its own company and Audiobooks.com became part of Recorded Books. Can you tell us a bit more about sort of what the strategy of Audiobooks.com as going forward in its journey?
Ian: Sure, sure. Absolutely. And thank you for that. So as mentioned, I've been in audiobooks for the past 10 years and the digital space specifically focused for 8 of those 10 years. And what we've been doing at audiobooks.com has been trying to carve our own path against a, you know, giant market leader with what we feel is a nice blend of technology and as well as a strong content offering. And so through that lately over the past couple of years, we experimented with some of our own publishing in-house which was Audiobooks.com publishing and Hubble Audio. And really taking a look at what was out there in terms of the publishing space because we've seen such growth in the market over the past five, six years. And then with that, it became apparent that publishing and content was still paramount to the business. So we joined in with the Recorded Books family which is the largest audio publisher in the world and so we're quite excited about that. In the future, there's a more formal announcement coming just in a few weeks in early April. But between technology and excellent content, we're pretty excited about what the future holds.
David: That's great. We've got a great panel of Canadians that are in the industry, the audiobook industry that's been primarily dominated by the folks in the U.S. So it's great to see such great people working there. It's interesting because, you know, when you hear that at TPL, audiobook listening is up big time as you said, I was curious as to what the actual number is and sort of see the stats coming out of the States. The latest figure from the APA was a 34% growth in audiobook sales. APA being the Audio Publishers Association in the States. The Association of American Publishers in their last report said that there's a 30% growth in audiobook sales over the first three-quarters of 2016. And, you know, there's been lots of things happening in the States. And we seem to be poised to have lots of things happening here in Canada.
PRH Canada just recently announced that they're gonna start publishing audiobooks. Maria Gardner is gonna head up that program. Brayden Wright could be up here talking about the work that Actar has been doing to try and galvanise its membership, and train people in terms of doing audiobooks as narrators. Audible could be talking about, you know, its plans that it's been formulating in terms of Canada. And Martha Sharps [SP] has been involved with them this year about that. Kobo could be up here, maybe, you know. Like, it just seems, like, we're just kinda on a cusp of things here and maybe there's something that, you know, that people in this room could be involved in. And I just want to throw that first question out to the panel. But, you know, really, what do you think people in this room need to do with regards to audiobooks to put us over the edge into this kind of growth? And I'll look at Ian first to maybe talk about that.
Ian: Well, I guess what... So I guess I'll go to one of the points, the age demographic for what we're seeing and trends for audiobooks. So for Audiobooks.com, 90% of our business is done in the United States, but we do have a focus in Canada as well. So we do monitor similar data and we are seeing similar shifts as well. And if I compare this back to Simply Audiobooks days and the age demographic for a physical CD, audiobook CD consumer, it's much different. So it's obviously an older demographic. But for podcasts paving the way for spoken word being an acceptable form of entertainment, it's really helped expand the demographic. And so when you're thinking of 24 years old to be an average audiobook consumer and up to 35, it doesn't end there, though, it does branch out in a sense. It's going to be content specific and things of that nature.
So the net that we can cast is now wider. I don't think it has to be specific to markets. Some Canadian content as a retailer would definitely help us, so more Canadian content being created that is unique to Canadians, that would definitely help. But just when thinking of the consumer, there's... Again, it's a wide net that we can now cast with obviously, you know, podcast helping, the technology as you alluded to there too, counting cars, for us is the next movement for us that we're really excited about. So...
David: And it's interesting this concept of podcast. You know, really when you think about it, you could see it just as, you know, original audiobooks and we call it a podcast. But it could be seen as that. And do you see, like, a greater growth in one area? Like, original audio podcast versus adapted audio if we want to call it that?
Ian: So... No. I mean, I guess the area that we see the growth in unabridged content versus abridged content, I mean, that's an area in which abridged is almost like... It's almost taboo now even to mention that. So probably an area of growth to play devil's advocate against the podcast though, that is setting an unrealistic expectation in terms of price point for a consumer as well because most people don't pay for podcasts. And audiobooks are a little more expensive than free as much as, you know, production costs have gone down over time. And I think that is going to be...you know, that's going to help with things. You know, to talk about another individual in the panel, Cameron's company for Booktrack, what they're doing for, like, a premium audiobook experience, it's phenomenal. So if you haven't tried a Booktrack title, try it. If you have... Even if you've listened to an audiobook and you didn't enjoy it, give it a go. It's a very cinematic experience. It's cool. So sorry to segue.
David: No. Yeah, exactly.
Ian: That over there is a segue.
Cameron: Over to me. You know, actually it'd be kind of interesting to hear also... I was thinking about you because you guys are up to some interesting stuff as well and I know that you're the moderator. But I mean, I guess the question is that as an industry, you know, as all of us kind of being here in Canada, is how do we get our Canadian voices and the stories that we're trying to tell heard? Heard not just here, but you know, the great promise of digital is that we can broadcast out to the greater world. And so I guess, you know, one of the things I was trying to get a read on while here was, like, what's happening in the space here? And I think from... You know, there was a whole thing in London last December, Future Book decided to do a track specifically on audiobooks and they had publishers from different markets around Europe come and speak. And they had their sort of particularly sort of unique, you know, British perspective and UK based publishers. And then, you know, there was also something just recently at DVW. Not specifically on audiobooks, but there were a bunch of audiobook-related panels. You know, having kind of come up through the crazy days of ebooks and digital, it just feels like there's this huge opportunity in front of us to, you know, really get our stories out and share them with the world. So you know, I think whatever we can do to, you know, double down on that I think will, you know, serve us all very, very well.
David: I think one of the things is for us is that we create a lot of content in this room, right? And the fact that content could be audiobooks and has... You know, in the States, they just think of that, you know. What blew me away was the fact that you look at ads for books at PW for instance, "Publisher's Weekly," and you see it says, "Now available in print, ebook, and audiobook." You know, that's just the way they do things. That's not the way we do things in Canada. So it's introducing that kind of culture to it, I think, in terms of the way we think about, let's take that content that we have and let's do something with it, whether we license it or whether we produce it ourselves, let's get it out there in that kind of format.
Noah: And just to kinda pick up on that a little bit. I don't want to beat a dead horn, but it's been brought up a couple of times is metadata is really important again to discovery, right? So we don't... It's in a study. I don't have the actual numbers, but we don't... In our bibliographic warehouse which we do for the Canadian industry, we don't have many audiobooks. We know there's more audiobooks available because we can look at TPL that are available in our market where we don't have any metadata for. So our publishers putting that metadata in their feeds or they're putting their related product composites, or they're pushing it out so that it can be discovered. If you're using ACTRA and you have a famous person reading your book, do you have that in your metadata so that they can be searched on besides just the author? Like, that full step still needs to happen, I think, in a lot of cases. So...
David: Right. Yeah. And another thing that you found in your stuff is that it's a younger audience that's gravitating towards audiobooks. And Ashleigh, you're, you know, you're kind of reaching that market and you're creating stories in a different kind of way, with writers. You know, are you finding that it's easier to get buzz amongst that sort of younger crowd in the way you're doing it?
Ashleigh: Yeah. You know, I think we definitely see that our younger users are interested in audio. I think to your point on the different... Some of the different ways or the new ways that I think they're consuming it, when we look at what they're creating on places like SoundCloud and YouTube to be the audio equivalent of their YouTube books, a lot of it isn't like a traditional audiobook of someone just narrating and reading a book. It resembles more like a radio play or radio script. So I think that's interesting as far as the how engaging they want it to be and they want different voices, and they want it to be more immersive.
I think to build on the comments about podcasting and moving from free to paid and the expectations that that sets, that's also something that we're very used to at Wattpad. You know, Wattpad is free to consume and yet we are transitioning a lot of our users into paid products. But I also would hope that a lot of publishers are looking at how many podcasts are successfully monetising. You know, we don't always have to charge the consumers. I know audiobooks is somewhere where people are experimenting more with subscription, but Wattpad has been doing branded content for years now and I can tell you that sometimes, you know, the budget that a brand has can be higher than you would ever sell enough books for. It doesn't always have to be creating a commercial for the brand either. A lot of brands, for the exposure, are happy to bring you something, "brought to you by..." And there's been some really innovative podcast this year. Like Tinder did an amazing podcast that was just like, sex and relationships, and advice. And they hired a really cool woman to do them. And it wasn't about Tinder, it was about Millennials dating and it was really popular. GE has a fantastic one about technology every week. Like, I think there's ones that are really good fits and I can imagine so many brands being really excited to sponsor fiction podcasts.
David: Yeah, it's interesting because it's... When we're talking about ways in which, you know, audio is being used not in that traditional audiobook sense like I'm gonna, you know, be in my car, and listen to something. You're talking about it being used in a different kind of technological way which kind of expands that world of where and how audio can be used. And Ruth, your... I mean, the read-alongs, when you say that thing that word lights up and again, there's technology that's being used in that kind of way.
Ruth: Yeah. For us, the audio really started probably almost 8 or 10 years ago now in conjunction with our literacy programming. So you know, part of literacy, there's four sort of pillars, reading, speaking, writing, and listening. And we had a lot of people asking for the listening part. So we started off by making these little pre-loaded mp3 players which seem so old-fashioned now, but we still sell them. Two books per pre-loaded thing, they're in a little box and you can put it on the shelf, and we sell quite a lot of those to libraries and schools. And then we started doing more trade or regular audio, and that's definitely been a harder slog, not to be the "Negative Nelly" on the panel here. But, you know, bigger investment, more words, and we still haven't... So this for us would be like YA novels and middle reader novels. Still haven't hit the market on those yet really well as compared to our literacy-focused ones. And the latest one being the picture books, the read-alongs which we're definitely seeing quite a bit of success with those. And you know, smaller investment. So it's a bit... For us, audio has not been an overall success. It's been a bit mixed.
David: What's really interesting for me about this is audiobooks is about content for sure, it's about the story. But it's now introducing a whole other artistic element which is the narrator into the picture. And, you know, coming to understand what that contribution is and to maximise that contribution has been an interesting learning curve for me. And I'm wondering about whether it's been for you and maybe for you too, Ashleigh, in terms of whether the writer simply read for themselves. So Ruth?
Ruth: Yeah, we've done a bit of both. We have one series of nonfiction picture books for young readers where we've had the author narrate it because she's a psychiatrist and it just seemed to sort of fit. But there's a lot of ones where we're picking narrators. And I think it's very important to pick the right narrator. I mean, some people are, I don't know, surprisingly boring even though they're audiobook narrators. You listen to them and think, "Oh, I wouldn't want to listen to this for very long." So picking the right narrator, we also think about it in kids books in terms of whether it should be male or female. So I think it's a crucial part and then, the one thing, just... If I can say one other quick thing that you should think about if you're thinking about going into audio is the proofing, which when we look at the cost of producing the audiobook and hiring the narrator, and getting it done, we then proof it in-house. And it takes quite a while. But what's been really interesting about it because we're trying to do it on the same timeline as our print books is we do sometimes find mistakes even though the audiobook is created from the final manuscript or the final book. We do actually sometimes find mistakes that we're able then to fix in print as well. So that's been an interesting sort of side benefit to the process of creating audio.
David: And when you have a good narrator, the same thing happens. Brayden actually has done that in a couple of our books that he's narrated for us where he's pointed out mistakes and we go, "Wow, okay." And Ashleigh, how about you at Wattpad?
Ashleigh: Yeah. You know, the first thing that comes to mind is a bit of a tangent for us, but I think it's probably kind of interesting to the audience. That's something that's in a bit of a gray area rights-wise, but the amount of online influencers that will find Wattpad stories and read them on their YouTube channels, or in other areas like that. And the effect that that has on traffic to the original source is massive. I don't know how familiar many of you are with Twitch. Do you know the live gaming platform? Something that was kind of unexpected for us when we launched Tap is that there's a lot of programs that will let users share their screen and video themselves, and react. And it's been one of the biggest driving sources of people downloading the app of these Twitch stars that will read a Tap story while they react live on camera and it's been really surprising to us. And while it's definitely in a gray area rights-wise, the amount of traffic that it drives back to that reader and writer, everyone's been really thrilled with it so far.
David: Yeah. That's really interesting because I've seen that happen so much in the gaming world. To see that happen in audio, that's fascinating. Well, I'd like to take your questions, we've got like eight minutes left. So yeah, go ahead.
Attendee 1: The narrators are the rock stars in the audiobook world so that we have customers that will only read or listen to books by a certain narrator. So that's what...they like the voice and they will listen to anything as long as that person is reading it. I was really surprised by that.
David: Yeah. It's a really good point and that's one of the things we learned early on is that the traffic at libraries especially is people follow the narrator. When you think they follow the author, which happens, but they follow the narrator. There's a trust to that voice that they're going to deliver a good story. So again, choosing that narrator is such an important thing. Other questions?
Attendee 2: Hi there. I was just curious if you had any insights or thoughts a little more specific to the juvenile market, and I'm thinking of more middle-grade readers. And just thinking about the idea that audiobooks reach reluctant readers, that is certainly a world where that happens a lot. And just curious of the opportunities there.
Ruth: So that's how we started out with our high/low series for reluctant readers where we created these pre-loaded mp3 players and it has been a very strong market for us. Not so much in bookstores or in fact, almost not at all. Primarily, directly to schools and libraries. And we offer collections where you can buy the print book and the ebook, and the audiobook, or any sort of combination thereof. We also have curated collections on topics and stuff like that where we offer any sort of mix and match that the teacher or the librarian wants for the reluctant reader. And there's that listening aspect. But I think there's also just for young readers who are maybe struggling a bit, there's the, you know, it's cooler to wear a pair of headphones than it is to read a skinny book that's obviously written for a younger reading level. So I think there's that aspect of it for them as well.
Ian: I can say on the retail side within our child genre, it's one of the most popular in terms of analytics within our mobile applications, one of the most popular genres that are being visited, not necessarily consumed. The price points tend to not match say the duration of content where the children's content would be shorter in nature. So from a retailer, again, from a retailer's perspective, I think there's absolutely an opportunity there if priced accordingly.
David: Yeah, it's interesting. And Ruth, are you finding that you're seeing more take-up on the institutional side than on the consumer side, or what's sort of...
Ruth: For those reluctant reader ones, yeah. And we also offer... I should have said we offer it as a digital download as well. It's not all on these little mp3 players. But yeah, definitely on those books. We have a bigger institutional take on the...
David: What's your pricing strategy? Sort of thinking about Ian's plan, is your price lower for a consumer at all or...
Ruth: No.
David: Yeah. That's interesting.
Ruth: Which may be why we don't sell it to the consumer that much. Yeah. The read-alongs, we definitely are seeing more of the OverDrive, public library and presumably, you know...Apple is starting up on that. So that sort of stuff goes more direct to consumers, but the literacy stuff is more to school libraries.
David: So it's interesting, the idea of the pricing strategy might go a little more like the way the ebooks went that if you have sort of a higher institutional price for an audiobook versus... Maybe more in the kids' sphere, I don't know. And then you have a sort of a lower consumer price for an audiobook that you might actually get a little bit of more traction. I don't know.
Ruth: Yeah. I think that with the high/low series that we have, we don't even sell those much in bookstores as print books. They tend to be... So we think our market is schools and so that's where our focus is with them.
David: Yeah, that's cool. More hands?
Noah: I'd actually like to say something about that. At Future Book as I mentioned earlier, there was a presentation from Louisa Livingston from the Hachette UK consumer insights group and she was speaking about some consumer research that they'd done on the consumption of audiobooks in the UK. And what really struck me in her or in their observations was that they, you know, had determined that there's sort of a group of people that have already consumed audiobooks and that there was a group that they could definitely say would never consume audiobooks, but there was this massive group in the middle that was...essentially, it identified as being interested and ready to be swayed. And so when you come to sort of think about things about, you know, is there a market for middle school readers or reluctant readers, I think we can see that there are some trends that exist in the space already. But I think that we're still, I mean, you know, even though, you know, Ian's been doing this for years and years, I still feel like we're at the foot of the mountain here and there's a great opportunity for us to explore sharing these stories in a whole new way.
I know anecdotally from speaking with a few people at London Book Fair just last week... Oh, my gosh. That they had confessed to sort of handing over their Audible accounts to their 12-year-olds and letting them control the consumption which I thought was really fascinating and I can sort of speak to the experience of reading to my kids, you know, every night and also sort of using them as guinea pigs for, you know, what we're doing over at Booktrack. But, you know, the first experience of actually hearing someone speaking in Audible really blew my 11-year-old's mind. I think that, you know, they're the next readers. They're the ones that we're gonna have to sort of like, help compel to wanna consume the stories that we have to share and I think that, you know, for me, that's where I see a lot of the future opportunity.
David: Yeah. And also just in terms of technology that's actually really already out there too. And it's gonna be the younger crowd that's gonna embrace that technology. But we're gonna see, you know, as people buy their new cars, the new car's gonna come with CarPlay, it's gonna be a wired car. It's gonna be installed in there and, you know, I don't know if audiobooks are recorded, you know. But because there's Apple involved with that. I'm sure Audible's involved with that, but there's gonna be just a way for you to get that content. And, you know, just in the same way that I remember when screens sort of got into cars and I think video usage, I don't know what happened with video, but it must have shot up because people could watch the movies in their cars, where people start listening to audio in their cars.
Ian: We're already embedded in General Motors vehicles for the 2017 rollout. There's AT&T subscriptions with Wi-Fi. We've embedded Climb. We've partnerships with Jaguar, Land Rover. We can connect a car outside of CarPlay and Android Auto. The automotive manufacturers are viewing the connected car as a possible commerce platform in the future. They need the entertainment for the vehicle and so video will be a problem legally. And so they are looking at audio. So, you know, anything from internet radio too and then audiobooks, you know, it only makes the most sense.
David: And what about watches?
Ian: So watches is a trend right now which we are participating in. It's for the active, you know, obviously for the active. So it's... We do see some usage there. We also have Apple TV. We've seen that there's almost as much on Apple TV as we have in the watch platform only because of the connected home. So the connected home is becoming much more, I guess common as well. So it's great.
Attendee 3: So if you're thinking of getting more people hooked on the audiobook, why don't you take advantage when people have to hang around for long periods of time, maybe just like, with a subway delay, where there's Wi-Fi and you have a poster with a code saying, "Hot new audiobook. Get the first chapter for free. Get EPUB."
David: So if you didn't hear that. What she's saying is that find those places where people are gonna be stuck for a bit like a subway that's been delayed and put your poster there that gives them a chance to listen to the first chapter of an audiobook for free, which is a brilliant idea. All right. Well, I wanna thank everybody for sharing their insights into audiobooks.
Noah: Thank you.
Ainsley: We hope you've come away with a lot more knowledge about the state of audiobooks in Canada as well as some inspiration and ideas about what the future might hold for audiobooks. To learn more about Tech Forum or the work we do, visit booknetcanada.ca. Thanks to David Caron, Cameron Drew, Ashleigh Gardner, Noah Genner, Ruth Linka, and Ian Small for this fantastic discussion. And thanks to all those who help make Tech Forum a success, including the attendees and all the great speakers. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for this project. Thanks for listening. Until next month.
