For Audio Publishers, Digital Media Is the Wave of the Present: APA President Anthony Goff on How Publishers Are Adapting

July 2009 By Heather Fletcher

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Extra: What are the bright spots in the industry?
Goff: [Digital downloads and library purchases] are certainly two very bright spots for audio right now, in that, in this economy, the libraries have more and more people going to them, [plus] the ease of download, with people not needing to leave … the comfort of their own home to purchase [a book]. ... Digital MP3 players ... [are] so very standard now that you don't see that many people [without them]. And now that cars will have plug-and-plays in their dashboards that make it possible to listen to your MP3 device right in your car, there's no longer a barrier. … The CDs are still holding on, but they've been declining a little bit more than the downloads have been growing over the last year. So it's now a rapid transformation. ...

Extra: What factors, such as illegal downloading or the popularity of the Amazon Kindle, are exacerbating the decline in sales?
Goff: We look for illegal downloading, and we don't see a lot of it. ... It's really hard to gage how many people will be reading on their Kindle or listening [with the] text to speech [function] on their Kindle [instead of] purchasing audiobooks, because it's just so very different having a computer-generated voice versus a full-out production and sound effects, etc. ... It's not exactly what we do. We're all about the production value and what that brings to the entertainment of listening to a book. ... We [had] been seeing such fantastic growth over the last few years; it was really about a year, a year-and-a-half ago that things started to slow, and it was really in the last …, maybe, 8 to 10 months that things really seemed to get hit very hard. ... We do fully expect, as audio publishers, for things to come around … . People might be consuming in different ways, but we do anticipate a good bounce back. ... It's not doom and gloom right now. ... We're going to band together and do everything we can as audio publishers to really keep the format growing … . And there's been a bit of a tipping point with e-books now, so it's their time to shine. It's really a good time for digital, in general, and e-books and audiobooks will hopefully continue to prosper from that.