Carturesti invests €450.000 in AudioTribe, 1st Romanian audiobooks platform

Carturesti concept book stores announced joining AudioTribe, 1st Romanian audiobooks platform with content in Romanian and English, by investing €450.000 in the project. The audio books, the highest developing format worldwide, started catch up on Romanian market also, once with the launch of AudioTribe.ro (launched in August 2021 as Echo Audiobooks). 

With multiple renown partners in the publishing world, AudioTribe sold by now over 25.000 audiobooks and diversified its portfolio from a few hundred Romanian audio books to over 15.000 audiobooks in Romanian and English. As the costs for paper and printing keep going up, doubling or even tripling, the investment in audio assets is a strategic move that even publishing houses are embracing, some of them taping even 10 titles a month.

 Serban Radu, co-founder Carturesti, said:

We are enthusiastic to join officially a project we were following with interest and supported from the very beginning. At Carturesti, we always built experiences around our readers, listening to their feedback and modeling our proposals to match the interests, expectations and dreams of those visiting us. We are believing AudioTribe comes as a needed development to satisfy these expectations, adding to the ecosystem of the book market in Romania. In the alert rhythm of our lives, the possibility to continue or move reading in new context is game-changing for a reader. To be able to listen to a book while commuting, prepare dinner or run in the park means sometimes to double or even triple the number of books read in a month. And that is beneficial for the readers but also for authors and, generally, for the entire book market. The more people we are bringing around books, printed or audio, the closer we are to our mission to transform Romania through reading.

According to Radu Nicolau, co-founder AudioTribe, the startup has plans to double the Romanian portfolio and to expand the English one, invest in new studio, playing audiobooks on chapters and introduce podcasts on the platform. Moreover, the app will continue to develop its functionalities.

The most listened audiobooks in Romania were the personal development ones, SF series, thrillers and crime.

When it comes of the listeners in Romania, 60% are women, and the average time spent on listening to audiobooks is 7.2 hours per month.

Audiobook is available at European level, but not in UK, Cyprus, Malte and Northen Ireland.