Audible CEO Bob Carrigan at London Book Fair 2026; Photo Robert Parfitt
By Erin L. Cox, Publisher | @erinlcox
On Tuesday at the London Book Fair, Audible CEO Bob Carrigan announced plans to expand their service to 11 new international markets–Belgium, Egypt, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.This move will allow listeners in these countries to access Audible through their local Amazon sites with audiobooks available in their local language and ability to pay with their local currency.
Publishing Perspectives understands these markets were identified as having key growth potential based on factors like the current books market segment and initial indications from local Amazon book sales.
For the Arabic-speaking countries listed, likely the launch of Amazon’s Digital Arabic Library in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Center (ALC) where they will be selling audiobooks, played a role in selecting those markets.
As for Sweden, which is likely the most well-established audiobook market in the world and the home of one of Audible’s competitors – Storytel – it illustrates more of a competitive move. Publishing Perspectives wrote about a similar move by BookBeat last month.
“In established marketplaces, the audiobook format is the fastest growing book format, but there are many countries around the world where there’s a dearth of audiobooks. There’s still so much growth around the world that can happen,” said Carrigan.
“We are experienced at going into new marketplaces and working with local authors and publishers, taking everything we’ve learnt with our subscription services in existing territories and introducing this around the world.”
According to “An Opportunity for Audiobook Global Growth Beyond the English-Language Markets,” a report published in September 2024, researched and written by DosDoce.com with data from Bookwire, published in partnership with the Frankfurter Buchmesse, “In the U.S. and Nordic countries, half the population has already listened to an audiobook. Great news, but that also means that there is another half that has not yet done so and in many European countries such as France, Spain and Italy less than 20% of the population listens to audiobooks and in the Arab and Portuguese-speaking markets the listening rate is well below 10%.”
While the report was intentionally focused on Europe and the languages spoken in those countries – French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, that this listening rate in countries that have established audiobook markets is still quite low shows there a lot of room to grow.
The report also highlights how audiobooks in these languages travel to other parts of the world, noting that “if the different agents in the sector made a greater effort to give visibility to content in other languages, we have no doubt that the consumption of these audiobooks would increase exponentially.”
While these markets are likely selected for a variety of reasons, providing the infrastructure to grow audiobook marketplaces, expand the market for books from around the world to these countries, and travel stories to new listeners is one that will help the global audiobook market continue to grow.