March 2025 News Roundup
Happy Spring and Congratulations to this year’s Audie Award winners and nominees. Good audiobook news continues with predicted sales growth and increases in the subscriber base. Spotify provides a platform for indie authors and announces a partnership with Eleven Labs. LALAL.AI paves the way for fair compensation in AI voice training and Octave makes advances in their speech-language model that claims to understand what words mean in context. Jason Reynolds offers a full cast YA title with a soundtrack and a Dean of Online Learning shares his use of audiobooks for lifelong learning.
General News
THE 2025 AUDIE Nominees, WINNERS and pictures!
Check out the glitz and glamour of the nominees, winners and attendees of the 2025 Audies Awards. [Source: audiopub.org]
Children turn to audiobooks as traditional reading falls away
Audiobooks should be used in schools alongside the written word to help children engage with literature, the UK’s National Literacy Trust has said. [Source: thetimes.com]
The business of audiobooks
Sales predicted to grow by 26% annually in AudioBook industry
Consensus about the growth of the audiobook market is consistent across all the analysis, but just how that will happen and which sectors of the audio industry will benefit most are not yet clear. [Source: radioinfo.com.au]
Libro.fm Reports a Surge in Subscribers
To sustain the momentum, Libro.fm plans to debut a web player that will sync with the listening app. [Source: publishersweekly.com]
Audiobooks During London Book Fair: Storytel Iceland Opens a Media Center
The Icelandic division of Storytel is introducing a new media center, a platform provided by Sweden’s Clipsource. [Source: publishingperspectives.com]
New Spotify Audiobooks publishing programme for independent authors
A new website has been launched for independent authors to submit short-form stories for audiobook creation and publishing consideration by Spotify. [Source: podcastingtoday.co.uk]
FEED YOUR EARPODS
Jason Reynolds to Release Original Audiobook
The latest offering from the MacArthur Fellow and former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature is Soundtrack, a YA audiobook featuring a full cast and original music. [Source: publishersweekly.com]
Hacking Leadership: Leveraging Audiobooks and Your Daily Commute
This article explores how I flipped the boredom of my daily two-hour commute into my most impactful professional development practice through audiobooks, and how it has shaped my approach to online learning leadership and institutional growth. [Source: onlinelearningconsortium.org]
A.I. News
Spotify is making it easier to release audiobooks narrated by AI
Spotify is bringing more AI-narrated audiobooks to its platform via a new partnership with ElevenLabs. [Source: theverge.com]
LALAL.AI Launches Voice Cloner: AI-Powered Voiceovers & Synthetic Voice Replicas Done Right
LALAL.AI ensures that every voice used in training was willingly provided by creators in exchange for fair compensation. [Source: streetinsider.com]
How AI enhances audio story telling, Radio days Europe 25
Ruth de Jager from Storytel and Ashu Behl from the Netflix-style audio platform series publisher, Pocket FM, describe how their audiobook platforms have used AI tools to enhance their publishing process. [Source: radioinfo.com.au]
Octave TTS: the first text-to-speech system that understands what it’s saying
Unlike conventional TTS that merely “reads” words, Octave is a speech-language model that understands what words mean in context, unlocking a new level of expressiveness and nuance—and new AI voice capabilities. [Source: hume.ai]
interviews & podcasts
How Audiobooks Really Get Made
Can you guess how many hours it takes to record one? Hint: It might take as long as it does to drive from Martha’s Vineyard to Laguna Beach. Sometimes longer. [Source: dearfiction.substack.com]