"After multiple trials, one becomes a loyal subscriber to audiobooks": Storytel's Yogesh Dashrath

The country manager India at Storytel, which competes with the likes of Amazon's Audible, Scribd, etc., talks about the growth of his platform and the industry.

Landmark and Crossword bookstores across India have remained shut for the most part of 2020 and 2021. Declared "non-essential" by the government, the country's book publishing industry saw players finding different ways of selling.

In an interview with the Press Trust of India (PTI), Ananth Padmanabhan, CEO, HarperCollins Publishers India, said that 2020 was an unprecedented year, with zero sales for over three months.

"This did teach us all many valuable lessons about the way we conduct our business. But even more importantly, about the way readers will buy books in the future - formats, retail, genres and how often too," Padmanabhan was quoted as saying last year. "We continued our publishing programme - beginning with digital-first, e-books through April and May. By late June, our new books in print had also started to go out - depending on how unlock rules impacted retail."

The second COVID wave hit the country earlier this year. Yet another Tsunami hit the publishing industry. About 70 per cent of the book publishing space is led by educational books, and the remaining 30 per cent is sold mostly in top metro cities, which witnessed partial, or full lockdown. The disruption saw an uptake in the consumption of audiobooks.

According to various surveys, Indians, who were stuck indoors, started spending around "17 hours" a week interacting with books. "Leaps and bounds," is how Yogesh Dashrath, country manager India at Storytel, describes the growth of the audiobook industry in the country. Yet, it is still not anywhere close to being a significant part of the Indian publishing industry, which is where he sees an opportunity.

Storytel is a Stockholm, Sweden-headquartered audiobook giant that operates in more than 23 markets across the globe, and claims to have over 14 lakh paid subscribers. Launched in India with a few Indian titles in 2017, Dashrath recalls that the audiobook industry then wasn't even worth a crore (rupees).

"People used to ask what it is and how it is going to work," but the heavy lifting of introducing the industry to the Indian publishers and readers is no longer necessary. Today, it is about attaining subscribers and building a content catalogue in different Indian languages. 

In an interview with afaqs!, Dashrath talks about the growth of his platform and the industry. Storytel competes with the likes of Amazon's Audible, Scribd, etc.