The numbers
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Google counted 129,864,880 distinct books in the world in 2010, and far more have been published since.
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The Audio Publishers Association counted over 750,000 active audiobook titles in 2025.
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That is fewer than 1 audiobook for every 100 books. The two counts measure different things (every edition ever printed versus titles on sale today), so read it as an order of magnitude, not a precise ratio.
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Google reported that about 95% of the ebooks in its own catalogue had no audiobook edition.
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Apple says it plainly to authors: only a fraction of books are converted to audio.
Why so few books get a narrator
A studio audiobook costs thousands of dollars per title: a professional narrator, a director, an engineer, hours of studio time for every finished hour, then editing and proofing. It takes weeks. A publisher only spends that on a book it expects to sell thousands of audio copies.
So the budget goes to bestsellers and the new frontlist. Backlist titles, textbooks, academic monographs, niche non-fiction, translations and books in smaller languages rarely make the cut. Neither do many self-published and out-of-print books.
Your copy is enough
With Book2Speech, any DRM-free book you own becomes an audiobook in seconds. Drop the EPUB, PDF, Word file or Kindle file, pick one of 265 narrators in 42 languages and press play. Chapters are detected, the copyright page and contents are skipped, and the text lights up as it is read.
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Find the book as a DRM-free file: EPUB, PDF with text, DOCX, MOBI, AZW3, FB2 or TXT.
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Drop it here. Narration starts while you choose a voice.
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Listen in any browser, on iPhone and iPad, and in the Mac app. Your place follows you between devices.
Sources
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Google Books Search, “Books of the world, stand up and be counted! All 129,864,880 of you” (2010): http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be-counted.html
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Audio Publishers Association, annual sales and consumer surveys: https://www.audiopub.org/surveys
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The Bookseller, on Google’s auto-narrated audiobooks and the ebook–audiobook gap: https://thebookseller.com/news/auto-narration-can-help-close-gap-between-e-books-and-accompanying-audiobooks-says-attamian
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Apple Books for Authors, digital narration support page: https://authors.apple.com/support/4519-digital-narration-audiobooks
Questions people ask
Is it really 99 out of 100?
As an order of magnitude, yes. Around 130 million books against about 750,000 audiobooks on sale is under 1%. The counts are not like for like, so the exact figure is uncertain, but the gap is enormous whichever way you count.
Will publishers record more books?
Some are adding cheaper digital narration, but they still choose which titles get it. If the book you want is not on the list, you do not have to wait.
What do I need to make my own?
A DRM-free file of the book, up to 10 MB. Free includes unlimited Standard voices in English and 10 minutes of Premium voices, so English books cost nothing to listen to.
Can I keep the audiobook?
Yes. In the Editor, choose Download audiobook for one file with chapters and cover (M4B, MP3, Opus or WAV). Free includes 1 download, Listener 3, Premium 15 and Ultra unlimited.