A rapidly growing electronic publishing trend: Audiobooks for leisure and education

This contribution focuses on the relatively new phenomenon of the purely commercial availability of audiobooks, sometimes also called “spoken books”, “talking books” or “narrated books”. Having the text of a book read aloud and recorded has been for a very long time the favourite solution to make books and other texts accessible for persons with a serious reading impairment such as blindness or low vision. Specialised production centres do exist in most countries of the world for producing these talking books. But now a growing number of commercial groups have found out that there is a booming market for these products as people slowly get used to leisure listening to books instead of reading them. Some companies claim already having over 40.000 titles in spoken format in their catalogue. Major differences and possible synergies between the two worlds are discussed.