Why Are Audiobooks So Expensive? - Book Riot

In 2019, half of Americans older than 12 had listened to an audiobook, a number 44% higher than that of 2018. The data points to there being an increase in those numbers in the years to come. Audiobooks became so vital in my life that I ended up getting a subscription to Storytel; it’s an audiobooks on demand app similar to many others out there, where you pay a monthly fee to have access to a catalogue of books. A sort of Netflix for books.

I share it with two other friends, and it costs me close to $8, which is a great deal for all of the books I have available on the app, since the catalogue is pretty decent. Of course, this also means I don’t own any of these audiobooks, but I don’t tend to re-listen, so it works perfectly for my needs and budget. On top of this, I am also part of Libro.fm’s ALC (advanced listening copy) program, and I get a few audiobooks for free each month, which I get to review on different platforms. It is safe to say I am currently not lacking in audiobooks to listen to each month, often my biggest issue is really choosing what to listen to next. But it wasn’t always like that.

When I first started listening to audiobooks, Audible was the most known audiobook app out there (Libro.fm was not yet a thing), and I couldn’t really afford their monthly subscription. Or rather, for $15 a month, I preferred to invest my money on a print book I could own and touch. So I used to check their audio daily deal every single day. For $2–4 I managed to grab wonderful audiobooks once in a while, especially nonfiction.

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But even with daily deals and whatnot – or maybe especially because of their daily deals, since it lowered the initial price substantially – I still wondered what made audiobooks so expensive. Why was a print copy I could hold, own, and loan the same price – with all of the process involved in printing that book – when an audio copy seemed so much easier to simply copy and distribute.

It’s a question that popped into my mind again recently, when I needed to buy an audiobook for its full price. That prompted me to do some research to find out what the deal with the prices of audiobooks is. I hope this post helps you understand a little bit of what goes into creating an audiobook.

What, in the end, makes them so expensive. Or are they, really?

Cost Of Production

When we have the final audiobook in our hands, it is difficult to imagine all of the work that went into it. After all, it’s not even a physical product, just a file we keep in an app on our phone. But the production of an audiobook is no small matter. Some claim that the creation of an audiobook resembles a movie more than it does a print book, and I guess they have a point, although it is more comparable to that of a radio show.