Digital book market booming

With an iPods in hand and more bestsellers like "Harry Potter" available for download, the audio book markets in Europe will soar 20 percent this year and next, industry watchers say.

Audio books on CD and tape are a standard feature in most bookstores, but digital audio books promise growth rates that continue to outstrip sales increases in most paper book genres as podcast listeners and others more accustomed to getting their audio over the Web get older. .

"Audio books are a growing branch, and we get new customers without cannibalising the market share in conventional books," said Penelope Liechti, export manager for audio books at the BBC, which distributes bestsellers like the JK Rowling's first five "Harry Potter" tomes and the radio version of Douglas Adams's "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

"It is the distribution channels that are more important than the product itself," Liechti told Reuters at the world's biggest book fair in Frankfurt.

"We expect a 20 percent [market] growth in audio book sales across continental Europe in 2006," said Liechti, with the same in 2005.

The growth is increasingly driven by Internet platforms like Web media company Audible, which features BBC downloads in the UK and also launched a platform with German language audio books last December.

New on-site distribution concepts are also being introduced.

In Germany, Europe's second-biggest audio book market after the United Kingdom, customers could soon find docking stations in book stores enabling them to download their book onto a USB stick while still getting on-site advice in the shops.

Similar download stations could be installed in petrol stations, while some supermarkets already stock audio books.

In Germany, turnover has increased 20 percent so far in 2005, said Marc Sieper, a member of the association of German audio book publishers.

Up to $120m (?8.6m) worth of audio books are expected to change hands in 2005, compared with about $72m in 2004.

"We will certainly get some saturation at some point, but I cannot see that happening for the time being," said Sieper.

Meanwhile, in the UK, Europe's biggest and also most mature audio book market, with a turnover of $124m in 2004, publishers expect a maximum growth of 5 percent for 2005 and 2006.

A lot of British publishers will look abroad for more growth, said Barry Clark, chairman of the Audiobooks Publishers Association in London.

"In many, many places audio books are still unexploited," Barry told Reuters. "In a lot of southern European countries, people still think of audio books as being only for blind people. We need to change that attitude."

Growth rates in continental Europe are also of interest to foreign language publishers like the BBC, with a younger and more foreign language speaking audience snapping up spoken books, especially in smaller eastern European countries that have no audio book industry of their own.

"There is currently much more of an appetite for our books," said Liechti. "For many non-native English speakers, this is a brilliant way to practice their English."