The BBC Joins The Audiobook Trend

BBC Radio 4 listeners will be able to tune in later this year to a series of twenty unabridged classics, from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to The War of the Worlds by HG Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. The works will be available to stream on the BBC Sounds app at the end of the month, and we are delighted to see that the featured classics will also include Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.  

There's been a growing trend in listening to audiobooks over the past few years. In 2018 alone, Audible customers downloaded nearly 3 billion hours of content, while in 2015, a ten-hour production of War and Peace, which was broadcast on Radio 4 over most of New Year’s Day, was awarded the plaudit of a “brilliantly high-brow binge” by the Guardian. If you're also a fan of the written word in spoken word format, and you've not come across the BBC Sounds app before, you can find more information about it here.

We're looking forward to hopefully seeing the rest of Jane Austen's novels become available via the app in the future.