The Audiolibrix survey is the most comprehensive annual snapshot of European audiobook listener behaviour, and its 12th edition contains several findings that should prompt publishers to reconsider some of their most persistent assumptions about the format.

The most important finding is the one that has been building for several years: 63% of audiobook listeners report reading more books overall than before they started listening, up from 49% in 2021. Only 6% of audiobook fans do not read printed or e-books at all. Together, these figures constitute the most robust available evidence against the cannibalisation thesis — the fear, still common in parts of the industry, that audiobooks are eating into print and e-book sales rather than expanding the total reading market. The data suggests the opposite: audiobooks are, for the majority of listeners, an additive habit rather than a substitutive one.

The demographic gap is the survey's most commercially urgent finding. Listeners under 24 account for less than 3% of new audiobook listeners, despite the fact that 88% of all respondents use mobile apps as their primary listening device. Young people are not avoiding audio as a medium — they are consuming enormous quantities of podcasts, video essays, and short-form audio content on the same devices. The challenge for audiobook publishers is not technological; it is one of content format and discovery. The survey data on speed — listeners under 34 are significantly more likely to use 1.1x speed or higher — suggests that younger audiences who do engage with audiobooks are consuming them differently, and that production choices optimised for 1x listening may not be optimised for the habits of the next generation of potential listeners.

The cover art finding is genuinely surprising and deserves more attention than it typically receives. Forty-two percent of audiobook listeners say cover art influences their choice of title, despite the fact that they will never see the cover while actually consuming the product. This suggests that cover art functions as a discovery and credibility signal in audiobook retail contexts — a visual shorthand for genre, quality, and positioning — rather than as packaging for the product itself. Publishers who treat audiobook cover art as a lower-priority deliverable than print cover art may be leaving discovery value on the table.