The Bookseller - Features - Surprise! The UK audiobook market stands at over £1bn

The UK audiobook market blew past £1bn in 2023. It's time to re-evaluate. Audiobooks have been the fastest-growing segment of books in the UK-by far-for more than a decade, delivering consistent 30%-plus year-on-year growth. And yet, it is still often perceived as a relatively small niche, estimating its value at £200m, a fraction of the overall market, easily overlooked and underfunded.

And although £1bn versus £200m feels like too big a disparity to explain away, it's actually quite straightforward. Here's how the maths works.

Let's start with the well-recognised figure of £206m. That is the amount UK publishers made from audio content in 2023, based on invoiced sales reported by the Publishers Association in its annual Publishing in 2023 report.

The challenge with this number is it doesn't show how much retailers made from this content. Total consumer spend defines the market size. Given Audible and Amazon's dominance since 2008, publisher net receipts are likely to be less than half the total value of customer spend. This means that consumers actually spent over £400m buying content from UK publishers who report to the PA.