What Audible Learned About 7,000 Listeners From Its NYC Bookless Bookstore: ‘How Do We Take Something Invisible and Make It Tangible?’

More than half of Americans aged 18 and older, an estimated 157 million people, have listened to an audiobook, according to the Audio Publishers Association. Back in May, Audible likely added a few more to the fold with its Story House experience, which the Amazon-owned audiobook company proclaimed to be the first ever “bookless bookstore.”

Following a pop-up during the return of BookCon at NYC’s Javits Convention Center in April, the Audible Story House operated for a month (from May 1-May 31) in lower Manhattan and saw more than 7,000 unique visitors come through its free-to-enter doors.

“What I was excited about was the opportunity to learn a lot more about customers and their experiences in that space,” Audible’s global head of brand content marketing James Finn tells Variety. “And oftentimes, I don’t have a sample size like that, and I don’t have a situation where we show up for an entire month in a city like New York and really learn more about our existing customers and new listeners.”

Located at 260 Bowery, the three-floor audiobook space offered guests the chance to browse titles using physical “Story Tiles” (blocks with RFID chips that made listening to samples via speakers, headphones or through your own phone and earbuds a quick business) throughout seven distinct listening spaces. It housed an immersive listening theater with Dolby Atmos surround sound and a “Listening Bar” with a dedicated “Story Tender” staffer offering up personalized recommendations for sampling. There were creator programming and panels, book clubs, hands-on crafting activities, a pop-up cafe from Brooklyn’s Land to Sea and tons of merch.

“It was very hard when we closed the doors, I will be honest,” Finn says. “And a lot of people assumed that it was going to be there permanently, which was a nice compliment to the team that built the space.”

Out of the 301 titles that were on offer in Audible’s Story House (“We never say what the one title is because everybody had an opinion — but we wanted to add that one more,” Finn says) 98% of the audiobooks were listened to “to any degree” over the course of the month in operation. The most popular included “Project Hail Mary,” “The Hive: A Thriller,” “George Orwell’s 1984,” “Just Kiss Already,” and Audible’s full-cast recording of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”

There was also a lot of interest in Matt Dinniman’s “Dungeon Crawler Carl” LitRPG series, which released new book, “A Parade of Horribles” on May 12. “People were coming in, and they had already listened to it, and the eighth book had only come out a couple days ahead of time, and they were still tapping it, and they still were excited about that,” Finn says.

But it wasn’t just the “Carl” fans that were sticking around. Audible says it counted more than 15,000 “deep engagement” experiences among its Story House guests, meaning the person did more than simply enter the space and browse.

“People weren’t just coming in and then leaving, or coming in and listening to a sample and leaving,” Finn says. “They genuinely were staying around, going to the different areas, or coming to the community sessions where we had different activities, or going up to the cafe and buying an AudiBuddy and that was really interesting.”

Finn says the Audible team has also been looking at “what are the learnings from the actual experience in New York that we can adapt to the experience within the app and within the service.” The biggest takeaway: “removing friction and allowing more engagement and allowing more of an opportunity for personalization, so that they have the opportunity to go to what’s interesting to them, but to sample and to try.”

Audible now has those 13,000 leftover “Story Tiles,” so there are some plans for what to do with those tactile representations of audiobooks.

“We created that technology and that item. It didn’t exist,” Finn says. “The ambition was, how do we take something invisible and make it tangible? So the RFID component with it, we were able to see what people were listening to, and it was fantastic because everybody has different tastes and we saw such an interesting read across the entire slate of content there.”

Finn adds: “But after the fact, what we’ve been doing is assessing what does Audible Story House look like in our plans for ’27. Right now, what we’re doing is similar to what you saw at BookCon. We’re going to bring a version of that with the core fundamentals to Guadalajara Book Festival, and then Frankfurt Book Fair.”