Audiobooks: Bonnier's BookBeat Opens in Spain and Italy
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Loading... - Drew Hamilton
- 07 Nov 2022
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I can still feel the breeze of Storytel going by, on the way to France. ‘Tis the season, it seems, for audiobook services to enter new markets.
Niclas Sandin‘s BookBeat, a Bonnier brand, has announced that it’s going into Spain and Italy.
Spain, as Publishing Perspectives readers know, is this year’s guest of honor at Frankfurter Buchmesse, which opens exactly four minutes from now. Okay, it actually it runs October 19 to 23, but the pre-Frankfurt deer is in the headlights now, as anyone being asked for last-minute meetings is discovering. And Italy is Frankfurt’s guest-of-honor-in-waiting, its year being 2024 after we have Slovenia take the honor in 2023.
In these newly opened Italian and Spanish markets, BookBeat is using the increasingly popular time-usage subscription format. There are three packages offered, ranging from 10 to 100 hours of listening time. The prices run:
· €6.99 (US$6.77) for 20 hours
· €9.99 (US$9.68) for 50 hours
· €14.99 (US$14.53) for 100 hours
This is a trend to watch. To date, the two main subscription formats have been the “all you can listen to” route and the Audible approach (in the United States, not in all Audible markets) of a single audiobook per month for a subscription cost of close to US$15.00, quite similar to the price of Bookbeat’s top tier. Very few books offer 100 hours of listening, so it’s immediately evident that even at its highest rate of a comparable US$14.53, a user is getting a lot more sheer listening hours than normally can be had in a monthly Audible subscription, and the BookBeat subscriber can use those hours as he or she sees fit, not just in a single choice of book. Read More…
