A selection of some 2,000 Spanish-language audiobooks, spanning genres from contemporary fiction and children's books to business and science fiction and fantasy, is now available from digital audiobook supplier Libro.fm. Booksellers can browse the inventory and view recommendations at https://libro.fm/espanol.
"The big thing for us is audiobooks are growing and they're growing in all different categories, including Spanish-language," said Mark Pearson, Libro.fm's CEO. Pearson explained that adding Spanish-language titles was one of the requests that Libro.fm heard most often from its customers and bookseller partners. "We want to make it easy to discover Spanish-language audiobooks."
"Libro.fm has given us an extra tool to battle the apathy of long-lost readers," said Juan Giron, owner of Giron's Books in Chicago, Ill., which specializes in books by Latin American authors and Spanish-language translations. He added that this will help bring the "age of smartphones" to his customers and into his bookstore.
Adding Spanish-language titles has been in the works for the better part of a year, Pearson said. He noted that more and more publishers are making efforts to expand their Spanish-language offerings and he expects Libro.fm's selection to continue to grow over the months and years ahead. And on the subject of other foreign-language audiobooks, Pearson said Libro.fm is looking into it, but there is nothing to announce just yet.
And with Audible expanding its inventory of Spanish-language titles, Pearson continued, it became important to offer a competing selection. Said Pearson: "The fact is, we're competing on behalf of bookstores with Amazon's Audible."
"It's an example of how we're growing," said Pearson. "We're looking to different markets and trying to serve our customers in a way that would be difficult to do with print books."