The audiobook business is easy to overlook alongside streaming and podcasting, but its revenue has grown for 15 straight years. Now, a dramatic surge in the number of available titles is pushing the industry toward a more selective phase, as publishers decide which projects merit greater investment while the catalog expands faster than revenue.
More than 750,000 audiobook titles were active in 2025, up 43% from the previous year, according to the Audio Publishers Association. By comparison, U.S. audiobook revenue grew 9% to $2.43 billion during the same period, slowing from a 13% increase in 2024.
That gap between the rapid expansion in available titles and slowing revenue growth is creating new pressure across the industry. More titles are competing for a finite amount of listening time, raising the value of established audiences and making it harder for individual projects to break through. Publishers and producers must decide where to put their money and marketing muscle, while audio rights that were once routinely bundled into book deals are becoming a more valuable asset for authors, publishers and a growing number of companies competing to acquire them.
At the same time, the overall audience continues to expand. Some 58% of American adults — an estimated 157 million people — have listened to an audiobook, according to the APA, up from 51%, or roughly 134 million, a year earlier.
The widening gap between title and revenue growth points toward a more selective market, with the battle for consumers’ attention affecting publisher spending, author leverage and the value of audio rights. As audio becomes a bigger piece of the book business, controlling those rights gives publishers another way to monetize a project, while authors with enough clout can sell them separately. What was once often treated as an add-on to a print deal has become another asset publishers, producers and platforms can compete over.
The explosion in podcasting offers a lesson for the dilemma audiobooks are facing: While podcasts helped build audiences for on-demand spoken-word entertainment, the podcast boom also demonstrated the downside of abundance. As more content competes for the same listening time, discovery becomes more difficult and writers with a following become more valuable.
That’s the same dynamic with audiobooks.
“Audiobook rights have become both more valuable and more competitive to acquire,” Eric Sandler, chief strategy officer at Pushkin Industries, told TheWrap. “In publishing, audio has gone from being the piece nobody negotiated — and many still don’t — to what can amount to an incredibly impactful part of the deal.”
Even five years ago, audio rights were often bundled with print rights without a clear value attached to them, Sandler said.
“Today there’s a real market, real comps, and competition amongst bidders,” he said.
Those bidders now include traditional publishers, audio-first companies, podcast studios and distribution platforms, Sandler said. Spotify has also moved deeper into audiobooks alongside Amazon’s Audible.
And just like in streaming and podcasts, more content does not guarantee consumer attention.
Publishers follow the audience
For authors, the growing competition puts a premium on having an established following.
“Leverage, meanwhile, follows the audience,” Sandler said. “Authors who bring listeners with them continue to have a leg up.”
Audiobooks must also compete against podcasts, music and other entertainment for a limited amount of listening time. That competition is beginning to affect which projects publishers pursue.
Science fiction and memoirs are among the genres performing particularly well in audio, McManus said, and he expects the format to play a bigger role in title selection as it grows, although print remains a much larger part of the book business.
Producers are also looking for ways to make audiobooks more distinctive. Pushkin focuses on narrative nonfiction and projects that can make particular use of audio, Sandler said.
Its productions can include interviews, multiple voices, archival material and music instead of simply recording a narrator reading the text.
“What does this book become if it’s truly built for the ear?” Sandler said of the company’s approach.
Malcolm Gladwell’s forthcoming “The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic” expands on reporting from a series of Pushkin’s “Revisionist History” episodes. The audiobook, narrated by Gladwell and produced by Pushkin, will be released alongside the print and ebook editions on Sept. 29.
The project shows how one idea can move between podcasts, audiobooks and print. But strong production is only one way to stand out.
Who are the winners?
A decade ago, some publishers allowed authors to keep their audio rights, while some books were not released as audiobooks at all, according to Kimberly Brower, literary agent and founding partner and CEO of Park, Fine & Brower Literary Management.
That has become harder as audio has grown. Brower said audio has gone from something publishers wanted to control to something they “need to have.”
But the boom has not necessarily delivered the financial gains for authors that its growth might suggest.
Asked whether audiobooks have led to larger advances or higher book valuations, Brower said they sometimes have, “but I have not seen it move the needle as much as one would think given how high audiobook sales have gotten.”
The APA views the industry’s growth as broadly beneficial, with more production helping authors and producers while allowing distribution platforms to add subscribers, McManus said.
APA data also shows younger consumers embracing audiobooks, which could expand the market for publishers, creators and platforms.
But those gains are not necessarily shared evenly.
Authors with enough leverage can sometimes keep their audio rights and sell them separately, creating another source of revenue.
“More authors are separating their audio rights but I wouldn’t call it the norm yet,” Sandler said.
The practice is most common among authors with enough audience and leverage to understand what their audio rights are worth, he said. Independent authors can also sell audio directly through self-publishing platforms.
“The vast middle still bundles audio and print,” Sandler said.
Brower said authors ultimately have as much leverage as they have alternatives. Some publishers will not bid on a project unless audio rights are included, which means authors who insist on keeping them can lose buyers for the larger book deal.
Audio has therefore become more important without transforming the economics of every deal. More companies want the rights, but not every author has enough leverage to benefit from that demand.
Despite the gap between title and revenue growth, the APA does not view the increase in titles as a sign that supply is growing too quickly. Millions of books are still unavailable in audio, particularly in languages other than English, APA President Sean McManus told TheWrap.
“The growth in active titles is filling a demand rather than driving additional supply,” McManus said. “As the format grows, consumers are looking for all books to be available — backlist and frontlist — and publishers are filling that need.”
Audiobooks are not suffering from a lack of demand. Revenue is still growing, younger consumers are embracing the format and publishers are working to make millions more books available in audio.
The challenge is determining which titles benefit as the catalog expands — and who captures the upside.
