Reading without reading

At last week's Spoken Word Awards, the BBC was declared Spoken Word Publisher of the Year. The result was pretty much a foregone conclusion. The BBC is now far and away the top audiobook publisher, taking a large chunk of the £72 million a year the market is now worth. Such predominance is not difficult to account for. The BBC enjoys the fantastic resources of its archive (its top sellers recently have included The Tweenies, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Lord of the Rings, Alan Bennett's reminiscences and The Ladies of Letters spoof) and its tapes are incessantly promoted in broadcasts.

But last year the BBC also took over the two leading independent producers of unabridged audiobooks, Cover to Cover and Chivers. These firms have been rolled up into a new division called BBC Audiobooks, now comprising five separate imprints, all shortly to be moved out of London to a new building in Bath.

There are two ways of looking at this development. One is that it is yet another example of the BBC suppressing the competition. BBC Worldwide, the corporation's overall marketing arm, is an aggressively expansionist operation, already Britain's ninth biggest publisher, thanks to endless TV tie-ins. Now it has cornered the unabridged audiobook market by buying out its independent rivals.

If the audiobook industry were any more important, such a move would surely be referred to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission for giving the BBC too much clout. For example, the commercial digital radio network Oneword, which broadcasts audiobooks, used to have an exclusive relationship with Chivers, but that was terminated-when the BBC acquired the company. In December, the BBC is launching its own digital radio station, BBC7, which will feature readings among other archive material, in direct competition to Oneword.

The other way of looking at the BBC's takeover of the unabridged audiobook industry is that it is acting as the benevolent leader of a business which has always been only marginally profitable and which can only benefit from the overall expansion its investment will foster. You can take your pick, depending on your view of the inherent goodheartedness of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Until recently, audiobooks were a labour of love, rather than a route to riches. That changed with the arrival of Stephen Fry's readings of the Harry Potter series for Cover to Cover. Previously, most popular audiobooks had been brutally cut, so that they could be fitted on two tapes and priced at slightly less than the book.

The Harry Potter tapes demonstrated that unabridged readings could reach large audiences. They are far from cheap, retailing at £21.99 for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, £49.99 for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but the price has proved no deterrent. In the 12 weeks up to 7 September, JK Rowling sold nearly 17,000 sets, generating a total revenue of £480,684.

On Boxing Day, 2000, Radio 4 broadcast the whole eight hours of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone non-stop, an initiative that won the new Controller of the network, Helen Boaden, high praise.

It has long been rumoured that the BBC bought the company largely in order to acquire the Harry Potter rights. However, Jan Patterson, the publishing director for BBC Worldwide's-spoken word division, insists that the negotiations were entirely separate, even if they were going on at the same time.

Patterson believes that audiobook buyers in general are turning increasingly to unabridged recordings. "As people become more and more aware of audiobooks, they actually think that rather than listening to three abridged recordings a week, they'd prefer to listen to one whole one." In the past, many readings were ludicrously sketchy, with great 19th century novels being whizzed through in 90 minutes. "If you have listened to an abridgement, you have listened to a version of the book - in the same way you may have seen a film or a play - but you haven't listened to the original book by any means," says Patterson.