London’s bookshops are a haven from the city’s bustling streets.
Even in this era of screen dependency, the simple pleasures of escaping into a literary classic inside Daunt Books, or losing yourself in a graphic novel in Soho’s Gosh! Comics, are frankly unmatched.
If you’re looking to take your love of local booksellers even further, you can now support them through your audiobook habit.
Bookworms may already be wised up to a service called Libro.fm. The audiobook platform essentially gives a cut of your purchase to an independent bookstore of your choice. After operating exclusively in the US and Canada since 2014, the service is now available in the UK as part of its international launch.
What is Libro.fm?
Libro.fm currently features more than 400,000 audiobooks from over 2,200 partner bookshops around the globe. These include a total of 76 UK bookshops, of which seven are based in London.
You can purchase individual audiobooks from Libro.fm using a free account, or sign up for a membership, through its website or smartphone apps for iPhone and Android. In fact, you can even get the audiobook platform on your Apple Watch.
After creating an account, you can assign yourself a bookstore that will receive a portion of your audiobook purchases or a £9.95 monthly membership fee.
As every title is DRM-free, you can access your downloads on any device without restriction.
You can also change your chosen bookstore if you want to support a new indie business in your neighbourhood or move countries.
Which London bookstores are on Libro.fm?
Libro.fm’s current selection of London booksellers spans Belgravia Books, Bethnal Green’s intersectional queer bookstore The Common Press Bookshop, Finsbury Park’s wine and book hangout BookBar, children’s bookstore Tales on Moon Lane in Herne Hill, The Kew Bookshop, The Sheen Bookshop in Richmond, and the Children’s Bookshop in Muswell Hill.
Alas, it’s a short list at launch, but you can always nudge your local bookshop to join Libro.fm if they haven’t yet.
To help you find sellers that match your causes, or reflect your identity, Libro.fm lets you filter bookstores based on if they are woman-owned, black-owned, LGBTQ+owned, and more.
Tapping into its partners’ knowledge bank, Libro.fm boasts a wealth of curated lists, recommendations, discounts, and even recorded author events from local bookstores.
What does a Libro.fm subscription include?
Libro.fm offers avid listeners a subscription that gives you a credit for one audiobook per month and a 30 percent discount on additional purchases. You can cancel your subscription any time, and request refunds for audiobooks via email.
To make the most of its global rollout, Libro.fm is currently running a limited offer that grants new subscribers a bonus audiobook upon joining.
How does Libro.fm compare to other audiobook platforms?
Although Libro.fm claims to carry 99 percent of bestsellers and new releases, you may find that some audiobooks are exclusively limited to Amazon’s Audible due to rights and publishing licenses.
An Audible subscription starts from £7.99 per month for one audiobook credit, with additional tiers that come with extra credits for a higher fee, and annual plans. Many titles are also available for free on the service, plus you get some meaty daily deals that offer a different title for 80 per cent off each day.
Spotify also jumped into the fray last November, offering more than 300,000 titles at launch. Unlike podcasts, which are available for free, audiobooks must be purchased individually on the streaming service. The same goes for downloads on Apple’s iTunes service.
Spiracle is another little guy in a field full of heavyweights. The subscription audiobook platform offers titles from independent presses, including a range of literary fiction, non-fiction and international books and translations.
David versus Goliath
Brits can’t stop listening to books. While they are outsold by physical books and e-books, audiobooks are the fastest-growing category in publishing, with an 8 percent increase in UK sales last year to £164 million. The category appears to be cooling down after reaching a pandemic-fueled peak, according to a Nielsen BookData survey, but that is par for the course.
Local bookstores are at risk of being cut off from this lucrative market due to the dominance of larger corporate rivals. Amazon’s Audible holds sway over the audiobooks sector, and music streaming giant Spotify is also looking to make waves in the category.
For its part, Libro.fm bills itself as a “social purpose company” established to meet the long-term interest of independent booksellers.
“As an employee-owned company with just 18 employees in the US and UK, we have experienced firsthand the impact of large corporations on our business, just like many independent bookshops have,” said Mark Pearson, Co-Founder and CEO of Libro.fm.
Pearson added: “But we believe in the irreplaceable value of independent bookshops in local communities and economies. By expanding globally, we hope to provide readers, authors, and publishers with new ways to help their local bookshops thrive via audiobooks, all while making reading more accessible.”
