Books & Poetry

Download a free audiobook


‘Hello, Bill Nighy here.’ The low, still tones of Britain’s favourite fictional newspaper editor boom out of my laptop speakers unprovoked. ‘The idea of being told a story by anyone, from the time your parents told you stories at night, is perhaps the most ancient and one of the most satisfying ways of receiving such stories.’

Nighy is the official ambassador for silksoundbooks.com, a classy new audiobook outfit, which launched in June and draws on a pool of top-name actors who are also shareholders in the company to make exclusive recordings of books which, often, the actors have chosen themselves. The recordings are produced in state-of-the-art digital studios in Soho, and are only available as downloads from www.silksoundbooks.com (listen out for that voice).
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‘The principle was simple,’ says co-founder Brian Mitchell. ‘Audiobooks had a granny feel to them. But we thought that with the iPod, MP3, download era this must be about to turn. The download share of the audiobook market is only 10 to 12 per cent at the moment but we’re already getting 1 million hits a month on our website, which is fairly extraordinary. We think we’ve come in at just the right time.’

For anyone who still thinks that audiobooks are about soothing Radio 4 listeners, serving the partially sighted community, keeping kids entertained on car journeys or pandering to a lowbrow audience too lazy to read, be aware that the rehabilitation has begun. No self-respecting Time Out reader would admit to borrowing a Catherine Cookson cassette box-set from their local library (where audiobooks still tend to be located in a dusty corner next to the large-print volumes). However, invite them to download Simon Callow reading Peter Ackroyd’s ‘London: The Biography’ from the Time Out website – as we did, for free, last month in association with audible.co.uk – and audiobooks begin to feel a much hipper proposition. (Audible has just done a deal with Waterstone’s to enable customers to download all of its library of more than 17,000 audiobooks from waterstones.com.)

Jo Forshaw, of audiobooksonline.com and current chair of the Audiobook Publishing Association (APA), is on a mission to raise the profile of the spoken word. ‘The beauty of iTunes means that audiobooks are getting out of the shawl-and-clogs ghetto,’ she says. ‘Now you can go online and buy the latest Radiohead album and an audiobook at the same time. Audiobooks are going to go massive. And podcasts like Ricky Gervais are helping the image which is getting younger and cooler.’

As most audiobooks are still purchased on CD or cassette, price can be an issue. With studio time and actors’ fees to be paid, they aren’t cheap to produce. ‘It’s a hard sell when you are trying to sell an audio CD for £15.99 when people see the paperback discounted in Asda or Tesco for £4.99,’ says Forshaw. ‘Instead of comparing it to the paperback, if you compare it to a music CD where you are getting one CD instead of maybe five for a similar price, it seems much better value.’

To help reduce the cost to the consumer, Audiobooks Online has launched a rental scheme similar to lovefilm.com’s DVD rentals, offering an unlimited succession of CDs from £12.50 a month. Silksoundbooks.com, meanwhile, by keeping everything as downloads rather than CDs or cassettes, is able to offer a flat fee of £7.95 for all purchases.

Though image and price are certainly deterrents, the main reason cited in an APA survey of non-listeners as to why they didn’t use audiobooks was: ‘It never occurs to me.’ In response, the APA is planning a spring publicity drive. ‘It’s not about whether people choose a John Grisham or a Catherine Cookson but introducing the idea of listening to a book,’ says Forshaw. ‘Once people realise that you can iron or jog or drive while listening to a book then it will surge. I can get through around four books a week; a prolific reader with a substantial commute could probably do one a day if they went for an abridged version.

‘A lot of people think it’s a good way to catch up with the classics they think they ought to have read. One of our biggest sellers at the moment is “War and Peace” – unabridged! It’s about 50 CDs, but you could knock that on the head in a couple of journeys between London and Edinburgh. And “Atonement” is rushing out of the motorways [service station shops] at the moment. I can’t get enough copies.’

While audiobooks still tend to be biased towards murder mysteries and the ‘classics’, a greater range is becoming available as publishers’ understanding of the format grows. Faber is launching its own standalone audio list next spring. John Simm reading David Peace’s ‘The Damned United’ is already out on CD (Faber hope to make downloads available next year), and recordings of Peter Carey’s ‘His Illegal Self’ (read by Greta Scacchi) and Hanif Kureishi’s ‘Something to Tell You’ (read by Art Malik) are due to be released at the same time as the hardbacks in 2008.

Henry Volans is the Faber editor in charge of the publisher’s audio list. ‘Contemporary fiction isn’t traditionally served by audiobooks,’ he says. ‘Poetry is also very important to the new audio list. It is naturally suited to Faber’s audio format, and we wanted to make available recordings of our poets, from great ones of the past to new voices, for example Daljit Nagra reading “Look We Have Coming to Dover!”.’

Top-name acting talent is also lending the format credibility. ‘What we are trying to do at Silksound,’ says Mitchell, ‘is to take a book, cast it really, really cleverly and record it in very high quality. For example, to get Rufus Sewell to do Fielding’s “Joseph Andrews” was a coup for us. The voice has to really resemble the character you choose. Colin Salmon reading “Black Beauty” was the first time I’d understood Anna Sewell’s dark undertones, which are about slavery. A black actor can bring that out.’

Silksoundbooks.com aims to record 1,000 books in the next three years, with Julie Christie booked to read ‘Madame Bovary’, Bill Nighy signed up for ‘Dracula’ and Derek Jacobi for ‘Frankenstein’. ‘There’s something about a really well-recorded audiobook that feels like it’s happening right inside your head,’ says Mitchell. ‘It can have a really powerful effect. And that’s a great thing to do with literature.’

To hear more, visit itunes; www.audible.co.uk; www.audiobooksonline.co.uk; www.silksoundbooks.com