have grown faster than any other format in publishing.
They are bought by people who already read and by people who had stopped.
A , a kitchen and a gym are all places a printed book cannot go.
Comprehension studies find listening and reading produce similar for narrative.
The gap appears with dense argument, where a reader can stop and turn back.
Publishers price audio close to print, which surprises many buyers.
Production explains most of it: a studio, a and an editor for perhaps thirty hours of audio.
voices have arrived and are already used for technical and academic titles.
For fiction, listeners still prefer a human reader by a wide margin.
Narrators have therefore begun to negotiate over the use of their recorded voice.
A contract that permits a publisher to train a voice model changes the profession permanently.
Libraries face a separate problem, since audio are sold per rather than per copy.
A popular title can cost a library more in a year than the same book cost in a decade of print.