The French like a good laugh; Italians love adventure; and Germans want to know whodunnit.
Those are key findings of the Audible Compass, an annual review of listening habits commissioned by the world’s largest
audiobook retailer and conducted by the market research institute Verian. Last July, 1,000 active listeners between 18 and 65 years old in each marketplace were surveyed in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Mexico, and Brazil.
“Don’t ask me why, but the Germans, they love thriller, suspense, blood, and mystery—all the dark stuff,” said Barbara Knabe, head of EU content acquisition at Audible. The survey also revealed a higher preference in Germany for non-fiction over other EU marketplaces. Science/engineering was a favorite.
In France, according to Knabe, comedy is a bigger draw than for any other EU marketplace. A recent hit title added a touch of frisson to all the mirth. Clamser à Tataouine, the first novel by French film star Raphaël Quenard, is celebrated for its humor noir. “It is a kind of thriller meets comedy,” Knabe explained. “The audiobook [narrated by the author] went directly to the top 10 and was really a big success for us.”
In Italy, literary fiction is highly popular. The Alexandre Dumas classic adventure, The Count of Monte Cristo, is a perennial fan favorite.
Altogether, market differences across the EU give support to a basic rule of thumb. “Audiobook publishing is not a one size fits all,” Knabe said. This truism holds not only for listening habits but also for business models.
Audible tailors its business models by market maturity, Knabe noted, with credit- based packages in established markets (e.g., U.K. and Germany) and “all-you-can-listen-to” offerings to attract new listeners in less-well-developed markets like Italy and Spain.
“We have to differentiate between the markets, the needs, the customers, and as well as the size or level of how mature they are,” she said. “And this is really where I have learned so much here at Audible, taking over additional marketplaces—how different the needs, the taste and the appetite are are from the customer perspective.”
For 2025, Audible is investing €4.5 million to expand its Spanish-speaking catalog. In Spain, Knabe reported, listeners show almost complete preference for listening in Spanish. Narrator choice plays a strong role in customer adoption, she added, and local accents matter (i.e., with a bias for native Castilian Spanish speakers over Mexican Spanish).
So-called “Audible Originals,” produced by Audible and available only on its platform, also attract new audiences. For the Spanish market, for example, Audible has released an exclusive prequel to the Antonia Scott book series by Juan Gómez-Jurado, Knabe said.
Recently, Audible has begun testing AI narration for its Spanish, French, and Italian catalogs. The streaming service remains committed to human narration, Knabe stressed. Nevertheless, AI allows for accelerated catalog expansion.
“It’s very much driven by our motivation to innovate,” Knabe said. “There’s a huge potential for the whole industry. We know that only 3% of e-books are available as audiobooks, or, put the other way around, 97% of e-books are not available. And when you think about the non-English speaking markets, the number’s even smaller.”
Audible and other similar streaming services have begun to offer podcasts along with audiobooks, drawn by the mass
Barbara Knabe popularity of podcast hosts. “We want to collaborate with creators in all formats. We can bring in a voice, an author, and then maybe the author jumps to [doing] an audiobook”
Before joining Audible, Knabe worked for nearly 20 years in film and television. In 2019, she joined Audible from StudioCanal, a Canal+ subsidiary, where she was executive vice president for television and digital distribution. The shift to book publishing has offered her an opportunity to build bridges between the two media worlds. “This is the reason why I love this job so much, because I have the possibility here at Audible to learn every day,” she said.
“What I see every day is one of the oldest industries—book publishing—meeting one that is changing so fast. I think this [leads to] a kind of friction, and it’s our job to make the best out of it.”
Christopher Kenneally is host of The Spoken World, a podcast series covering the global audiobook industry. He will moderate the panel discussion, Tuning into the EU: Trends and Opportunities for Publishers in Audio, with Barbara Knabe, Dr. Anke Susanne Hoffmann (Penguin Random House), and Lasse Korsemann Horne (Saga Egmont), on Wednesday at 1 p.m. in the Frankfurt Studio (Hall 4.0).
