Audiobook Insights

If you’re like me when you hear the word audio, book is the next word that comes to mind. But does your mind’s eye see audiobook or audio book?

Since I’ve been in the audio business for years, I think about things like this more often than most. But I hadn’t given this question much thought recently, until:

• I ran across a post on the Audiobooks.com blog titled Audiobook, Audio Book or Ȯ-dē-ō-bu̇k? [Someone else is thinking about this!]
• I searched Google+ and other social media sites for pages and posts about audiobooks and ended up having to do four searches – singular and plural for both terms – to get what I wanted. Each search produced different results.

Obviously, individuals and companies – including publishers – are using the two terms interchangeably and inconsistently.

So, if “audiobooks” and “audio books” mean the same thing, does in really matter?

If you’re a listener who just wants to download an audiobook or buy a CD, the answer is no. Either term will get you to a download site or retailer. (Most know enough to play the system by using both terms as keywords.)

But if you’re looking for information about the industry, audiobook publishers, reviews, interviews with narrators, market trends, etc., then the inconsistency really does matter. If you don’t explore all the variations, you miss a significant amount of data.

A post on the Social Media Examiner site titled 8 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Site With Google+ sums it up. Their first tip is Use “Their” Keywords, Not Just Yours :

Most of us have our industry-specific dialect. So we naturally try to use those words and phrases when we’re being intentional about our keywords. The problem is that most of our customers don’t use those terms or phrases.

In other words, from a searcher’s point of view, even though you use one phrase for a subject, other people use a different phrase or phrases. You have to take all into account.

Some background on how the word “audiobook” evolved

Back in the early 1990s the Audio Publishers Association (APA) decided to address the issue of what to call the product produced by its members.

At the time there were many names: audiobooks, audio books, spoken word audio, talking books, books on tape (actually a company name, but many people used it generically, and still do), recorded books (also a company name), and others I’m probably forgetting.

This variety wasn’t a huge problem for the public. People knew what you were talking about when you used any one of the terms.

But it was a significant problem if you were trying to promote the industry to consumers and to the media. And this is what the APA was charged with doing. It’s hard to talk about something when you don’t know what to call it. And it’s hard to have an impact when you don’t have a consistent vocabulary with which to talk about your subject.

So Just Pick One, Right?

You’d think it would be that easy, but of course it wasn’t for a variety of reasons:

• This was a committee trying to make the decision (Board of Directors = committee) and that never makes for easy decisions.
• It was a committee of strong egos with strong opinions trying to reach a consensus (another bad formula).
• It was a committee of people from companies with very different publishing agendas.

This last was probably the biggest issue.

In order to have a single name you need to convince everyone that you’re dealing with a single product. When you have companies that are producing full length (unabridged) audio adaptations of books, abridged adaptations of books, dramatized adaptations of books, original audio productions (not related to books), motivational and inspirational spoken audio, business audio (often lecture-based), instructional audio, etc., it’s not easy for them all to agree that they’re all in the same business. But this is exactly what everyone needed to believe if the APA promotional efforts were to be successful.

It appeared that “Audiobooks” won.

After much, often heated, discussion the APA Directors settled on “Audiobooks” (one word, small “b,” as former APA president Seth Gershel adamantly and rightly insisted).

Feeling pretty good about our accomplishment we got the word out – to publishers, producers, retailers, media, PR people, copywriters, etc. – that this great, diverse product category was now known as Audiobooks.

That was roughly 20 years ago.

Where are we today with acceptance of the term “audiobooks?”

• When you search Google for “audiobooks,” often the first thing you see on the results page is “do you mean audio books?”
• A Google search for “audiobooks” returns 113,000,000 results. “Audio books” returns 84,100,000.
• A search on iStockPhoto for “audiobooks” returns 42 images. “Audio books” returns 702 images, at least half of which are relevant.

It would be nice if there were one universally accepted term – so people could find what they want without so much fiddling – but that’s not likely to happen. It hasn’t in 20 years. It’s not even likely that one term will start to dominate. Listeners are setting the standard – and listeners appear to like both terms equally.

I like “audiobooks.” That’s the term I’ll use most often here. But you and I know that these things we listen to go by more than one name. And we know what we need to do cover all the bases.

But I’m still curious: What’s your preference?

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