More than 130,000 Romanians listened to at least one audiobook in Romanian in the last year, audiobook & ebook streaming platform Voxa said.

The Romanian platforms said it recorded 1.5 million reading hours in Romanian, the equivalent of 47 million read pages, in its first year of activity. Voxa launched in November 2021.

An audiobook is, on average, six to eight hours long, and the users' favorite titles are fiction and personal development ones. Jay Shetty’s Gândește ca un călugăr/Think Like a Monk, Shefali Tsabary’s Cartea femeilor care merită mai mult/ A Radical Awakening, and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis were among the most listened to titles in Romanian in the last year on Voxa.

"Globally, digital books account for more than 10% of the book market, and this segment's growth is at least 20% from year to year. If the local book market is evaluated at EUR 100 million yearly, digital books will have a share of around 1% only at the end of 2022," Dan Vidrașcu, the CEO of Voxa, explained.

The residents of urban areas are the most open to listening to audiobooks, and six out of ten Voxa users are from Bucharest. The capital is followed by Cluj (22% of the total users of the service), Timișoara (11%), Iași (11%) and Brașov (10%). 

Voxa estimates it will end 2022 with 180,000 users. The streaming service, which offers audiobooks and ebooks in Romanian and English, has 40,000 titles. In its first year, it had 130,000 recurrent users.

"Aspirationaly, everyone wants to read more, but many times the pace of life doesn't allow everyone to read daily. And this need to read and know more explains the rapid evolution of the first audiobooks in Romania. An audio format allows one to gain time for reading because they can listen to a book while driving, cooking, or walking the dog," Vidrașcu said.

(Photo: Oleg Dudko | Dreamstime.com)

simona@romania-insider.com