Bardowl plans to be 'Spotify for Audiobooks'

A new service plans to bring the Spotify and Netflix-style subscription model to audiobooks. 

Bardowl publishing director Rob Shreeve said that "not everyone wants to invest the time and money in owning and listening to entire audiobooks... people are now much more interested in grazing for content."

A one-off monthly fee will grant subscribers access to Bardowl's library of titles. Initially available only for iPhone, the company says its app will stream the books "without lengthy download times" and cache content on the handset for brief periods without 3G or Wifi access.

There will also be a facility to share a 30-second excerpt from any audiobook to social networks including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

While the initial launch library includes business and management titles, the company says they are in talks to expand into other non-fiction genres and "carefully selected" works of fiction.

"This is actually one of the startups in publishing that I'm more positive about," said Philip Jones, deputy editor of publishing trade magazine The Bookseller. "You can't do subscription-based ebooks as publishers are afraid of losing one-off sales, but audiobooks are a small enough market that they think more of potential gains than potential losses."

Mr Jones added that the contract Bardowl hopes to establish with publishers, including a 50/50 revenue split, should provide a better deal for authors and voice-over artists than is currently available from similar services such as Audible. The company hopes this will allay any fears authors and voice-over artists have about allowing their work onto the service.