With download figures at a high, all-star Hollywood voice casts and Spotify’s entry into the audiobook streaming business, the format is enjoying a surge in popularity

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.