For now at least Storytel would appear to have the upper hand in the India audiobook market, while Amazon rules the India ebook market. And that’s probably a status quo that suits both parties.
While Amazon’s Audible India service continues to offer titles in just English and Hindi, Storytel India has just announced the addition of its 9th language in its India digital books portfolio.
For R299 ($4) per month Storytel IN subscribers get unlimited access to 100,000 titles in English, Hindi, Marathi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada. As best I can tell there is no breakdown of title count by language.
Storytel IN also offers a Marathi Select package whereby for just R99 ($1.34) subscribers get a selection of titles just in the Marathi language.
By contrast Audible IN offers 200,000 titles, presumably mostly English as there are only two languages referenced, which will set the subscriber back just R199 ($2.70) for one audiobook per month, with the option to change it if you don’t like it. It seems the “Audiblegate” scandal that has so upset Audible US authors and publishers has not yet reached India.
While not referencing Audible, Storytel Country Manager Yogesh Dashrath made clear the difference between Amazon’s token nod to local sensibilities with its Hindi offering compared to Storytel’s inclusive approach:
India being a multilingual country, is almost like a cluster of many countries into one. People are now looking at being entertained in their own language. Going with this insight Storytel has now launched audiobooks in Malayalam language for its subscribers.
Dashrath continued,
One of the frequent questions I had to answer in book fairs and informal meetings is why is there no possibility to listen to audiobooks in only the mother tongue of the listener.
Following the insight, we added Malayalam as one of the many languages to our service with an aim to have stories reach more and more people. We are thrilled to take stories to Malayalam speaking people and are excited with the response pouring in!
We don’t know the revenues coming in to publishers from the respective Audible IN and Storytel IN services, but clearly on a per title basis the values will appear worrying small for outside observers, and even for Amazon and Storytel themselves one might reasonably ask “Why bother?”
Especially so given India’s internet penetration is at just 40.6%.
But hold on. That’s 40.6% of a population of 1.38 billion people, meaning that in India as we start 2021 there are 560 million people online. Compare just 312 million in the US, where there is simply no room to grow.
For both Audible and Storytel the sheer volume of those small revenue streams make India a market prospect worth taking very seriously.
The big challenge for Storytel IN will come if Amazon a) starts taking local language content seriously, and b) pivots to an unlimited subscription model for its Audible IN project.
That certainly cannot be ruled out given Audible offers just that model in Italy and Spain, but in India one of the biggest players in the market is Penguin Random House, which has a current policy of not allowing its titles into unlimited subscription services anywhere.
For now at least Storytel would appear to have the upper hand in the India audiobook market, while Amazon rules the India ebook market. And that’s probably a status quo that suits both parties.
