According to figures from Nielsen BookScan, audiobooks are now the fastest growing publishing format with 13% growth on sales in 2018. The figures were released at the London Book Fair’s Quantam Conference and said the audiobook boom is continuing with sales up 13% since 2017 and 97% since 2014!
Audiobooks now account for 5% of all book sales and have doubled their share of fiction sales in the last year. Forty percent of audio sales are through subscription models such as Audible and men are the biggest consumers of audiobooks.
Director of the London Book Fair, Jack Thomas, told The Bookseller : “There are so many reasons to be excited about the book market in the UK right now. Audio has been one of the major success stories in publishing over the past five years, and its incredible growth clearly shows no sign of abating.”
In other news, the printed medium is also holding steady with a 3% increase in volume on the market compared to 2017. Adult nonfiction is up 3% and maybe unsurprisingly the quickest growing category is Political and Government titles with 170% increase (up to 1.8 million books) thanks to releases such as Michelle Obama’s Becoming, Fire and Fury, and The Secret Civil Servant. Children’s general nonfiction has also seen a massive growth, up 30% in 2018, selling 590,000 more copies than in 2017.
One thing is for sure, the literary market is recovering and books are well and truly back in fashion!

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