eBook vs Print Book vs Audio Book with Rob Archangel

About this video

Dale Roberts interviews Rob Archangel, founder of Archangel Inc, on eBook versus print book versus audiobook. Rob says that historically, for their clients, digital has probably been the biggest revenue generator: overhead is really low, you can price competitively and shift price points, and eBooks surged with Kindle and rival readers such as Barnes and Noble’s Nook and Kobo. He now sees a shift back toward paperbacks — people like a physical book they can carry and annotate without a screen, especially after working in front of a screen all day — so print is at least evening out. Audiobooks, he argues, are the growth opportunity: he personally consumes 70 or 80 percent or more of content as audio or audio-visual, listeners can speed playback up and listen while cooking, exercising or walking, and storytelling by listening is a longstanding human mode. Industry-wide there are millions of books in digital stores but far fewer in audio, while digital buying is steadying and audio is growing. Shorter, punchier, actionable nonfiction suits audio especially well; a sprawling 100,000-word fiction book costs about as much to produce as ten 10,000-word books, yet the ten give ten potential avenues for readers to reach you.

Key takeaways

• Rob Archangel says digital has historically been his clients’ biggest revenue generator due to low overhead and flexible pricing
• He sees a shift back toward paperbacks as readers seek physical books away from screens
• He claims 70-80% or more of the content he personally consumes is audio or audio-visual
• Audiobooks are the growth opportunity: far fewer audio titles exist than the millions of digital books
• Shorter nonfiction suits audio best; ten 10,000-word books give ten discovery avenues for similar production cost to one 100,000-word book

Episode details: published April 14, 2018 · 5:12 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dale L. Roberts’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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