The industry’s habit of treating “private equity” as a synonym for “asset-stripping” has become an obstacle to clear thinking.

The Audio-to-Screen Pipeline – and Why The Claim Needs Scrutiny

RBmedia, the world’s largest audiobook publisher, has been celebrating loudly. Three of its titles – Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (adapted as One Battle After Another), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – underlie films that together gathered a remarkable haul of Academy Award nominations at the 2026 ceremony.

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein landed nine nominations. One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Pynchon’s sprawling California novel – with Leonardo DiCaprio among a starry ensemble – earned thirteen. The Secret Agent, reimagined as a Brazilian film and nominated in the International Feature Film category, brought further recognition. By any measure, it has been a vintage awards season for literary IP.

RBmedia’s press release frames this as a story about audiobooks: its recorded editions, the claim goes, helped inspire these cinematic triumphs. It is a seductive narrative, and it is worth pausing to examine how well it actually holds up. In the case of the Conrad claim, it does not hold up at all.

The Brazilian film The Secret Agent, written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, is set in 1977 during Brazil’s military dictatorship. It follows a former professor on the run, attempting to flee political persecution. It is a film about trauma, memory, and resistance under authoritarian rule – not, in any recognisable sense, an adaptation of Conrad’s Edwardian dark comedy about anarchists and a covert operative in London. The two works share a title and nothing else.

RBmedia’s press release links directly to its own recording of the Conrad novel as evidence of the connection. That link is the entirety of the evidence, because no other evidence exists. This is almost certainly an embarrassing error rather than deliberate deception – someone in the PR department matched a title, did not check further, and hit send. But it is a significant one, and it matters for how seriously we should take the rest of the claims.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Conrad’s The Secret Agent are unambiguously in the public domain – published in 1818 and 1907 respectively, they are available to any filmmaker without negotiation. Guillermo del Toro did not need to listen to a Tantor Media recording of Shelley’s novel to conceive his Gothic vision.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s attraction to Pynchon is well-documented and long predates any specific audio edition. Vineland, published in 1990, remains under copyright, but that simply means adaptation rights sit with Pynchon’s estate – not with whoever happened to produce the audiobook. RBmedia’s Recorded Books recording of the novel gave its producers no more claim on the film than a Penguin paperback edition would.

This is not to say that audiobook editions are irrelevant to the cultural circulation of literary works. There is a genuine and underappreciated story here about audio publishers as custodians of difficult or neglected texts – Pynchon in particular is not an easy read, and a well-produced recording can genuinely open a novel to audiences who might not otherwise encounter it.

RBmedia’s Recorded Books, Tantor, and Dreamscape imprints have invested seriously in production quality, and that investment has cultural value. But the causal arrow from “we produced an audiobook” to “this film was made” requires rather more evidence than a press release provides.

What the Oscar nominations do confirm, more modestly but still meaningfully, is that publishers with deep catalogues of literary IP – whether in print, digital, or audio – are well positioned when prestige cinema goes through one of its periodic returns to classical and canonical source material.

The cultural moment validates catalogue depth as a business strategy.

The 2026 cycle has been unusual in its appetite for adaptation: Hamnet, One Battle After Another, Frankenstein, The Secret Agent, and Train Dreams are all literary adaptations among the Best Picture nominees. For a company like RBmedia, which holds audio rights to an extraordinary range of titles, this is genuinely good news – not because its recordings caused the films to be made, but because the cultural moment validates catalogue depth as a business strategy.

The distinction matters for publishing professionals: the audiobook-as-IP-incubator argument is most persuasive when a publisher holds actual adaptation rights, or when audio exposure can be demonstrated to have reached specific producers or decision-makers.

In the cases RBmedia is celebrating, the more honest framing is that its catalogue overlaps significantly with what prestige cinema happens to value right now. That is still worth celebrating. It just does not quite support the “audio inspired the film” headline.

The Right Story: Volume, Catalogue, and the Infrastructure of IP

Set aside the causation question, and there is still a genuinely interesting structural story about what RBmedia represents in the contemporary publishing ecosystem. Chief Content Officer Troy Juliar’s stated strategy – “publish, publish, publish” – prioritises catalogue depth over individual title speculation. This volume approach, combined with exclusive author partnerships spanning Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, and Jeff Kinney, creates what the company describes as defensive moats against platform disintermediation.

The multi-brand architecture – Recorded Books for library markets, Tantor for retail, Dreamscape for genre fiction, BookaVivo for Spanish-language content – enables format-specific positioning whilst maintaining centralised distribution across more than fifty platforms, including Audible, Spotify, and library lending channels.

This is not audiobooks creating cultural moments; it is audiobooks being ready when cultural moments arrive.

When a title in the catalogue becomes culturally relevant – through an awards cycle, a streaming adaptation, a social media moment – the infrastructure to capitalise on that attention already exists. This is not audiobooks creating cultural moments; it is audiobooks being ready when cultural moments arrive. The distinction is subtle but commercially significant.

The Spotify partnership, announced as part of the H.I.G./Francisco Partners era, deserves particular attention. Spotify’s expansion into audiobooks has been the most disruptive development in spoken-word audio since Audible established its dominance, and RBmedia’s position as a preferred content partner rather than a reluctant supplier suggests it has navigated the platform dynamics more adroitly than many publishers.

Where some in the industry feared that Spotify’s entry would compress margins, RBmedia appears to have used it as an additional revenue channel whilst maintaining existing relationships.

Private Equity, Second Act – and a Counter-Narrative Worth Taking Seriously

RBmedia’s current ownership structure represents one of the more striking counter-narratives to conventional private equity expectations in publishing. The firm now sits with H.I.G. Capital and Francisco Partners, following its 2023 acquisition from KKR in a transaction reportedly exceeding one billion dollars. To understand why this is noteworthy, it helps to remember where the company started.

When KKR acquired RBmedia in 2018 for approximately five hundred million dollars, the reaction in publishing circles was familiar: here comes Gordon Gekko. The reference is to Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, in which Michael Douglas’s corporate raider became shorthand for financial buyers who strip assets, load debt onto productive businesses, and walk away enriched whilst the hollowed-out company collapses.

It is not an unfair cultural shorthand – the history of private equity includes genuine disasters, and the publishing industry has had its share of anxious moments watching financial acquirers circle creative enterprises.

The KKR-RBmedia story turned out rather differently. Over five years of ownership, KKR delivered five consecutive years of double-digit revenue growth. The catalogue expanded from 31,000 to over 66,000 titles. When the company was sold to H.I.G. and Francisco Partners, all 300 employees – having been granted equity stakes at the time of the KKR acquisition – received cash payouts based on tenure. Long-serving staff walked away with sums equivalent to twice their annual salary. In an industry not known for generosity towards its workforce during ownership transitions, this was remarkable enough to be worth dwelling on.

I explored this dynamic in August 2023, when KKR’s acquisition of Simon & Schuster was provoking the predictable Gordon Gekko comparisons.

My argument then was that KKR’s track record with RBmedia offered genuine grounds for cautious optimism, and that the publishing industry’s reflexive anxiety about private equity was sometimes, let me be polite for a change, insufficiently attentive to the evidence.

The RBmedia case has continued to bear that out. KKR’s final full year of ownership saw the company declare 2023 ‘another year of record-breaking growth’ – a result that H.I.G. and Francisco Partners inherited rather than engineered, having completed their acquisition only in September of that year. The new ownership has nonetheless maintained the trajectory: the catalogue has continued to expand and now stands at around 100,000 titles, with strategic partnerships secured with Sourcebooks, Abrams, and Spotify.

This is RBmedia’s second successive private equity ownership, which makes the growth trajectory all the more interesting. The conventional worry about the second private equity cycle – that the first owner has already extracted the obvious efficiencies, leaving the second with a more challenged asset and higher expectations – has not materialised. Either the audiobook market has grown fast enough to carry the company regardless, or successive management teams have found genuine operational improvements, or both.

The Broader Pattern: Private Equity and Publishing

The RBmedia story sits within a broader pattern that publishing professionals would do well to examine without the distorting lens of either uncritical enthusiasm or reflexive suspicion.

Barnes & Noble and Waterstones, both owned by Elliott Advisers, offer perhaps the starkest case. Elliott’s acquisition of Waterstones in 2011 came at a moment when the British bookselling chain was genuinely threatened with extinction, its parent group Ottakar’s having been absorbed in a consolidation that left the business structurally weak.

Under Elliott’s ownership, and with James Daunt’s distinctive (again, I’m in uncharacteristically polite mood today) management philosophy, Waterstones has returned to something approaching health – a counterintuitive outcome given how many comparable retail chains have fared under private equity.

Elliott’s subsequent acquisition of Barnes & Noble, and its decision to install Daunt as CEO of both, represented a genuine bet on physical bookselling at a moment when most financial observers were writing the sector off.

OverDrive, the library e-lending platform that is now integral to public library provision across the English-speaking world, was acquired by KKR in 2015. The fears at the time centred on whether a financial buyer would be willing to invest in the infrastructure, negotiate sympathetically with publishers, and maintain the relationships with library systems that made the platform work. The evidence suggests that KKR did broadly maintain those relationships, and OverDrive remains the dominant platform in its sector.

Simon & Schuster, KKR’s most ambitious publishing investment, remains in its early years of financial ownership and it would be premature to draw firm conclusions. But the choice of leadership – and the presence of Richard Sarnoff, a former Bertelsmann executive with deep industry knowledge, as a senior KKR adviser – suggests a more informed engagement with the specifics of publishing than the Gordon Gekko caricature allows.

Sarnoff was central to digital strategy at Random House, negotiated with Google during the books initiative, and understands that a publishing house is not simply an asset to be optimised but a business whose value is intimately connected to its relationships with authors, agents, and readers.

None of this is to suggest that private equity engagement with publishing is straightforwardly benign. The structural tension between financial buyers’ exit horizons – typically five to ten years – and the long-term investments that sustain publishing culture remains real.

A private equity owner has no particular reason to commission poetry, invest in translation, or take on debut literary fiction that will lose money in the short term but might matter in a decade. The homogenising pressures that concentrated ownership creates are genuine, and they operate regardless of whether the owner is a conglomerate or a hedge fund.

But the industry’s habit of treating “private equity” as a synonym for “asset-stripping” has become an obstacle to clear thinking. The more useful question is not whether private equity is involved, but what specific incentives a specific firm has in a specific acquisition, and whether the people making the decisions have the knowledge and relationships to make good ones.

By those measures, the RBmedia story – twice over now – suggests that the audiobook sector has benefited from financial ownership in ways that the conventional narrative would not have predicted.

Strategic Implications

For publishing professionals, the 2026 Oscar season and the RBmedia growth story converge on a single strategic observation: catalogue depth, distributed across multiple formats and platforms, is increasingly the core asset of publishing at scale.

The question of who owns that catalogue – and what they plan to do with it – matters enormously. But the assumption that financial ownership inevitably diminishes catalogue quality or long-term investment has not been borne out in the audiobook sector, whatever one’s broader anxieties about the direction of travel.

The audio-to-screen pipeline that RBmedia is celebrating may not work quite the way its press release implies. But the underlying reality – that a publisher with 100,000 titles in its catalogue, distributed across fifty platforms, with exclusive relationships with major authors, and backed by institutional capital – is extremely well positioned for whatever the entertainment industry decides to adapt next.

That is a genuine competitive advantage, and it did not happen by accident.

This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn newsletter.