In this lockdown when physical books became a hard thing to get, listening to literature emerged as a good alternative. Audiobooks became a hit in this 2020 pandemic. According to a survey, it is stated that the global audiobook market is expected to grow by 25% in 2020 to the value of US$3.5 billion. With such rapid growth in the audiobook market, this market is expected to grow up to $20 billion by 2030. If we talk particularly about the audiobook market in India, it’s value is somewhere between $500 million to $1 billion and it is expected to grow very rapidly in the coming years.
HISTORY OF AUDIOBOOKS IN INDIA
The culture of audiobooks started in India by Marathi radio channels. Books such as Bhalchandra Nemade’s path-breaking existentialist novel, Kosala, were aired on Marathi radio, as were some Hindi short stories on All India Radio. The next big step was taken by the National Association for Blind which brought in a huge collection of Hindi audiobooks as help to blind people. Though, this move wasn’t meant for commercial purposes. In my view, the biggest step was when ‘Reado audio books’ was launched in 2012. They had a collection of nearly 2000 audiobooks and in strategic partnerships with Penguin, Hachette, and Audible, among others. After this, India saw the rise of many platforms which provided services like audiobooks and podcasts.
WHY AUDIOBOOKS ARE MORE PREFERABLE OVER PHYSICAL BOOKS?
The main problem with physical books is their availability. You will have to go to a bookstore and even then, you can’t guarantee that you will find your desired books. Audiobooks have a plus point over physical books in this condition. You can find many platforms on the internet that provide services of audiobooks and thus it becomes more probable to find every audiobook that you desire to listen to. Audiobooks have some other advantages too.
- Listening to audiobooks increases your accuracy and fluency in reading and speaking. While the narrator(s) narrates the novel, the way he / she pronounces various terms can be noticed and studied.
- Multitasking is another benefit of audiobooks. You can perform different tasks while listening to any audiobook.
- Average length of an audiobook is between 40-50 minutes, which means you can get maximum knowledge in a very short time.
- While physical books are hard to get, audiobooks are easily available and accessible.
- You can revise them again and again. This is not possible with books as reading too many pages again may irritate you, but with audiobooks this is an easy task due to their comparably short length you can revise them anytime you want.
- Free audiobooks are not very hard to find, that means you don’t have to pay for them always as you have to do for physical books.
Keeping in mind that audiobooks is advantageous in so many ways, it is not very strange to witness a shift towards audiobooks.
WHAT GOOD DID THIS PANDEMIC DO TO AUDIOBOOKS?
As you all know, the government had to implement lockdown due to Covid. The main reason for implementing this lockdown was the tremendous spreading rate of CoronaVirus. The virus has such a great spreading rate that the count of cases in India has reached nearly 90 lakhs in just 8 months. With lockdown implemented all over the country, one couldn’t step out of their houses and thus can’t get new books. Obviously, you can’t read the same book again and again. You can read them twice or thrice but more than that will definitely bore you. People were restricted to their homes due to Covid and they had nothing much to do. You cannot watch movies all the time as too much screen time always becomes a trouble. In this situation, audiobooks became a great alternative and a source of entertainment. You don’t have to step out of your house to get them. All you have to do is to open your phone, search for audiobooks on the internet and you have a huge collection of audiobooks in front of you. There are many platforms which provide services like audiobooks and podcasts. Platforms like KuKu FM are known for free audiobooks and podcasts. All these factors made audiobooks a hit in the 2020 pandemic.
