Words-to-be-read are losing ground to words-to-be-heard, a new stage of digital content evolution | The Idea Logical Company

What really rang a large bell for me was the recent New York Times article about the rise of audio, which focused on big-earning writers whose fortunes and reputations had been earned through "words-to-be-read" (in what we can now see was really a different content era), but who were now switching to audio. One such author, John Scalzi, was moved to reconsider his publishing strategy when a recent book sold 22,500 hardcovers, 24,000 ebooks, and 41,000 audiobooks. Author Mel Robbins responded to her self-help book "The 5 Second Rule" selling four times as many audios as print by making her next creation an audio original.