Unabridged Audio Sales Increasing

Sunday’s Washington Post had an article about long-form audiobooks like War and Peace, which takes 70 hours to get through. Max McLean’s recording of the ESV, by comparison, takes 72 hours.

The article shows that, against the general trend of media consumption becoming more bite-sized, the market for long, unabridged recordings of books is expanding:

Given that pop culture is forever trending toward the condensed and the vapid, a 70-hour audiobook might sound like commercial folly—a Mensa product for an Us Weekly world. And maybe it is. Naxos won’t say how many copies [of War and Peace] have been downloaded directly from its site or sold in stores, where it retails for about $280.

But if the world has ever been ready for nearly three straight days of recorded Tolstoy it’s ready now. A few years ago, publishers had to beg retailers to stock audiobooks longer than three CDs. Now, that’s considered an ear snack. Unabridged is king. And abridged isn’t just on the wane. It’s basically stigmatized.

“We have readers who will get in touch with an author and express outrage if they see an abridged audio version of their book,” says Ana Maria Allessi, who heads Harper Collins’s audiobook division. “That drives authors insane.”

Downloadable books make it possible to store a spoken-word rendering of a big fat tome on an iPod, eliminating the need to stuff 25 CDs in a glove compartment. Plus, publishers and retailers figured out that audiobook fans aren’t semi-literates taking a break from “Two and a Half Men”; they are hard-core readers who consider abridgment a kind of cheating.

(Emphasis added.) Crossway has found that audio downloads of the ESV have sold well, which has in turn encouraged them to produce more unabridged recordings of their non-Bible books.

Via kottke.