After Bella Mackie’s first novel How to Kill Your Family was published in 2021, readers got in touch to tell her how much they enjoyed it. “But I’d get people saying, ‘I’m really sorry, I listened to it on audiobook’ – as if that wasn’t enough,” the author says. “I don’t get that caveat now,” she adds. “Something has switched.”

Audiobooks aren’t new: the American Foundation for the Blind pressed recordings of books on to vinyl records in 1932. Later, books became popular on cassette tape and then CDs. But the smartphone era has given the format a new lease of life, and data from the Publishers Association (PA) shows that UK audiobook downloads increased by 17% in the year between 2022 and 2023.

The official statistics for 2024 won’t be released until the spring, but it’s already clear that “2024 has been another record year for audiobooks, with more people listening across all genres”, says Jon Watt, chair of the PA’s Audio Publishers Group.

Chiefly, the boost has come from Spotify, which “has brought new listeners to the market”, Watt says. The streaming platform launched its audiobooks service in the UK in October 2023, including up to 15 hours of audiobook content each month in its usual £11.99 music and podcasts subscription. Spotify says it offers more than 350,000 audiobook titles to its 252 million global subscribers – a vast potential audience for authors. According to the platform, its three most popular audiobooks in the UK in 2024 were The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien, Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken and Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart.

For Mackie, the Spotify bump has been profound. Her publisher confirmed that audiobook listens for her novel What a Way to Go, published in September, were double those of How to Kill Your Family in a week-by-week comparison.

For a long time, Audible – an Amazon subsidiary which offers titles individually or via a subscription – has been synonymous with audiobooks. It is not the only such service – British platform Spiracle collaborates with independent publishers to produce exclusive audiobooks, while Yoto is a screen-free audio player for children – but Audible was for a long time the market leader, before Spotify became a “huge disruptor to Amazon’s dominance”, says George Mahood, a self-published author of humour and travel books.

Mahood says his audiobook sales have increased. “I now earn more money from Spotify than I do from Audible,” he says. But not because it pays more: “Spotify’s royalty rate is actually much lower.”

It is difficult to find a like-for-like comparison of audiobook rates because “the data around book sales is very opaque”, says Kim Scott, the author of Radical Candor and a member of the Coalition of Concerned Creators, a collective calling for transparency from Spotify about its author compensation model. The licences Spotify has agreed with publishers include the detail that authors only get paid in full if a user finishes a book. Scott estimates that “on average, people only read 50% of the book, and so that’s going to cut author pay by 50%”. In much the way that Spotify’s artist payment structure has been criticised for devaluing music, “the system is paying what’s easiest to measure instead of what’s most valuable”, Scott says. Spotify did not provide a comment.

It doesn’t sound promising for already cash-strapped authors. But Amazon already receives its fair share of criticism from book-lovers, and as such, Mahood thinks Spotify’s audiobook launch has been “a very healthy thing for the market. Amazon and Audible have been far too dominant so having a serious competitor like Spotify really shakes up the industry”.

Audiobooks can now be elaborate affairs: new Audible editions of all seven Harry Potter books, voiced by more than 100 performers, are due in 2025, while actors Ambika Mod, Thandiwe Newton and Mackenzie Crook feature in a new reading of Bleak House, the latest in an all-star series of Dickens audiobooks produced by Sam Mendes.

Scott describes herself as a “huge consumer of audiobooks”, getting through two or three a week. She uses Audible, and agreed with her publisher that her own books would not appear on Spotify. The format’s practicality is what appeals: “I can do the dishes and listen. I can go out in the garden and weed and listen. I can take a hike and listen. It allows me to get through more books.”

Audiobooks are also important for accessibility reasons, says book lover Robin Barayuga, 28, from Manchester. Barayuga, who is blind, says that while screen-reading technology means audiobooks are no longer essential, he still “dips in” to the format, particularly when travelling.

The publishing world can be snobbish about whether listening to audiobooks really “counts” as reading. But Barayuga predicts the format is only going to become more accepted, especially as neurodivergence becomes less stigmatised and more people “admit” to listening to audiobooks because they find the traditional way of reading difficult. “I think that will stamp out this idea that audiobooks aren’t a relevant way of reading.”

Barayuga also predicts increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) to read books, though he is uncertain how quickly it will catch on. “I think one of the reasons people love audiobooks is the fact you have somebody real reading to you, and you get the tonal inflections. AI doesn’t really capture that [yet].”

Mahood is excited by the possibilities AI offers for translating audiobooks into different languages, “opening up entire new readerships in other countries”. Spotify, which has used AI and machine learning to revolutionise how users listen to music, is well placed to take the lead.