Speaking of audiobook growth: imagine what it would be like if Audible bought HarperCollins.
That’s kind of like what just happened in Sweden. While our Scandinavian colleagues said they’d seen it coming, many in the wider industry were surprised to hear that Storytel—the Swedish ebook and audio subscription service—had bought the country’s oldest publisher, Norstedts Förlagsgrupp.
The move comes a short time after Storytel made another signal acquisition, that of Mofibo, Denmark’s ebook subscription company.
As Katherine Cowdrey writes at the Bookseller, “Norstedts publishes authors such as David Lagercrantz, author of the sequel to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, along with several Nobel Prize winners, such as Mario Vargas Llosa and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. Its imprint Rabén & Sjögren, meanwhile, publishes some of Sweden’s most prominent children’s book authors, including Astrid Lindgren.”
Quick background: Both Storytel and Mofibo operate generally along the lines of the all-you-can-read model of ebook and/or audiobook subscription service that has proved less successful in the States and elsewhere. The keys to their success appear to be data-sharing with publishers, and—most importantly—the participation of some 80 percent of prominent publishers in their markets, something the US subscription services (including Kindle Unlimited) have been unable to replicate. Storytel’s chief, Jonas Tellander, talks of his subscription services bringing new readers to Scandinavian publishers, widening their bases and generating new business.
What we find especially interesting here is that Storytel has begun contributing new material to the system. The Storytel Original program debuts this month as an offer of original audio programming for subscribers, for example.
Bottom line: We anticipate more instructive moves from Storytel, which benefits from its place in a smallish set of markets (the Scandinavian countries), but has aspirations of expanding much more widely. Perhaps we will also see original books produced for the Storytel subscriber base. In other words, we don’t think we’ve heard the end of the “original” factor in this subscription powerhouse’s plans, and we expect to see more work for authors if the company moves even more into original content.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
