The new owners of BBC Audiobooks, publisher of titles including Under Milk Wood, has pledged a multi-million-pound investment and new titles including stories by celebrities and sports stars to win over a young, web-savvy generation.
Michael Kuhn, the former Polygram executive and leader of a group of investors that yesterday acquired BBC Audiobooks, said that the operation held huge potential but had to adapt it business and content model for the digital age.
"What interested us about this deal is that it is a good old-fashioned business that has good cash flow that is in transition digitally," he said, speaking to MediaGuardian.co.uk. "As [the audiobook market] becomes more digital the audience is becoming different from [the traditional] middle-aged demographic."
Kuhn added that AudioGo, the vehicle which yesterday acquired a 85% stake in BBC Audiobooks for in excess of £10m, intended to launch new titles in areas including comedy, celebrity stories and comic books, as well as trying to get sports stars to launch audio versions of their traditional print memoirs.
"We want to move beyond BBC [content] and well-known novels," he said. "We are now in a digital era, a whole new era. Look at some of the bestsellers, [they use] ghost writers for memoirs, we can have someone sit down and tell a story over a week."
Kuhn added that the business, which BBC Worldwide said was profitable despite "challenging" conditions last year, was "doing remarkably well considering it has been for sale for the last year".
He said reinventing the audiobook business would not require the "tens or hundreds of millions of dollars" required in film-making, an area where he has extensive experience. But he added that a multi-million-pound investment programme was on the cards.
"It doesn't need a lot of funding to make it work, it is more about contacts and ideas of what to do," he added.
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