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Downloads send European audio book markets soaring

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CIOL Bureau
New Update

Karin Strohecker

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FRANKFURT: With an iPod generation coming of age and more bestsellers like "Harry Potter" available for download, audio book markets in continental Europe will soar 20 percent this year and next, industry insiders predict.

Audio books on CD and tape are a standard feature in most bookstores, but spoken books promise growth rates that continue to outstrip sales increases in most paper book genres as podcast users, who download audio programmes from the Internet to listen to them on mobile devices, 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 Britain's BBC, which distributes bestsellers like the J.K. Rowling's first five "Harry Potter" tomes and the dramatisation of Douglas Adams's "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

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"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 Inc., which features BBC downloads in Great Britain and also launched a platform with German language audio books last December.

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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.

PETROL AND HARRY POTTER

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

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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 100 million euros' ($120 million) worth of audio books are expected to change hands in 2005, compared with 60 million euros in 2004.

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

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Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, Europe's biggest and also most mature audio book market, with a turnover of 70 million pounds ($123 million) 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 the BBC's Liechti. "For many non-native English speakers, this is a brilliant way to practise their English."

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