Audio Books: Yay or Nay?

I recently decided to set up a small Facebook group to allow me to share my bookish passion with my similarly inclined Fb friends, without clogging up the feeds of those who are not so enlightened.
I have named this group Friends of Brown Flopsy's Book Burrow (catchy, I know!).

I (obviously) share reviews of the books I have read in this group, along with posts about other bookish topics that take my fancy, and I am hoping that my bibliophile group members will do so too, once the group takes off.
I am pleased to report that they have started sharing recommendations with each other a bit, so I am looking forward to more!

As it was recently Audio Book Week, I decided to run a poll to see which of the group members listened to audio books - I am a huge audio book fan myself, so I was curious to see what my bookish friends though too.


The results were very interesting.

I was surprised to see that the majority, of my bookish friends that took part in the poll, had not ever listened to an audio book. Particularly since recent news reports have shown that there has been huge growth in audio book sales.
On questioning, it seems that most of these were not sure whether they would like someone reading a book to them, rather than reading it themselves.
I guess this begs the question about whether potential audio book customers get enough opportunities to try them for free in the first place, or if they are simply not promoted enough to a wider audience. In either case, the recent move towards opening up audio books to reviewers and bloggers to promote them can only be a good thing.

A fair number of my friends have actually listened to an audio book, but they did not seem to have strong feelings about them one way or another. It was quite interesting that, on looking further, quite a few of these actually listened along with their children ie. they had bought audio books aimed at children, rather than the adult market.
From my own experience, I think that quite a lot of people do still see audio books as something to amuse their children, rather than for their own enjoyment - again, more promotion to the adult market would seem to be the answer here.

It seems that I am actually the only one of my friends who listens to audio books on a regular basis and I found this a little disappointing. I don't know if my love of audio books stems from listening to them as a child myself - I can even remember listening to an LP of The Brer Rabbit Stories by Uncle Remus when I was a tiny little tot! It would be interesting to see a study into whether enjoying audio books as a child means you are more likely to listen as an adult.

In my view, audio books are complementary to the hardback/paperback and e-book markets. The advantage of the audio book lies in the fact that you can enjoy a book while you are doing something else - be it housework, cooking, driving, walking/running etc. - which is how I tend to use them.

I am the first to admit that these results are based on a very small sample size and cannot be extrapolated to a wider audience. However, I think it is significant that the number of respondents who had never listened to an audio book was the biggest percentage, since poll was taken by my friends who would all consider themselves to be book lovers.

You have to wonder who it is that is buying all the audio books to lead to such a leap in sales? Food for thought...