At what point do we give up on books? Big data has the answer

When audiobooks got massive on smartphones, they were supposed to liberate us from the strictures of sitting while holding bound pieces of paper (or faffing about with CDs). Books could be consumed at ironing boards and steering wheels, and their convenience would spell the end of the bedside pile of unread – or unfinished – titles.

Well, it turns out we’re still natural quitters, whatever the medium. New stats revealed this week by audiobooks.com showed how many (or few) of us get to the end of a range of audiobooks. They make tough reading for Craig Oliver, whose No 10 Brexit memoirs, Unleashing Demons, kept only 20% of readers rapt until the end. The oft-unfinished War and Peace retained about the same proportion through its 60-plus hours of narration (stats were not available for Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time …)

“Good” results weren’t great: a 50.5% completion rate for Boris Johnson’s The Churchill Factor; 52% for Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, and 67.5% for Nick Clegg’s Politics: Between the Extremes.

Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller, says that the figures roughly mirror those occasionally released about ebooks, from which retailers can also glean reading data not dreamed of in the analogue age. But, he adds, publishers are not doing anything meaningful with it – yet. “I haven’t heard of a case where a publisher hauls in a writer and says, ‘They’re not reading beyond chapter five, can you make the plot pacier?’” he says.

Sarah Shrubb, the audiobook publisher at Little, Brown, says she does get notified if, say, a customer returns an audiobook to Audible, the Amazon-owned giant of the industry (it accepts returns even on completed books but not every time). But, she adds with a note of relief, retailers do not pass on stats on how far people get. “How it would influence us if they did, I don’t know,” she adds.

But there are signs of smarter things to come. Audible has identified romance readers as some of its most voracious customers, and is using machine learning to reward them. By scanning books according to existing reader behaviour within them (the equivalent of identifying well-thumbed pages in a library romance section), Audible is categorising key passages, including the sex scenes. Its “take me to the good part” feature does exactly that. If it were available to listeners of Craig Oliver’s Brexit book, with its unexpected political climax, it would seem unlikely that any more of them would get to the end.