By Jude Bowen, Senior Publisher for Education, SAGE Publishing

Did you know that SAGE and Corwin have just launched five audiobooks in our Education and Counselling disciplines? We have and we are making a lot of noise about them.

Being read to is a comforting thing, a form of connection with another human voice wherever you are in the world and whatever you are doing and in these challenging times, it’s no surprise that sales of audiobooks are booming. The growth of smart speakers and their prevalence in many homes is contributing to the appetite for and expansion of the range of audiobooks available.

In research we carried out with nearly 700 lecturers and 100 professionals, 26% of lecturers were already listening to audiobooks on topics related to their teaching, research and professional development, and 18% of professionals had already used an audiobook to help them with their professional learning, with more than 50% keen to try this as an approach. Most interestingly for us as a scholarly publisher working with the higher education sector, 61% of lecturers were interested in having audiobooks available for them to recommend to their students alongside the print copy.

Unsurprisingly, reasons such as being able to listen while on the go were cited as key drivers for the appeal of audiobooks, but there are educational benefits too for the listener. The Open University’s Innovating Pedagogy 2020 report highlighted the role that multi-sensory learning can play in improving outcomes for learners with additional needs (e.g. autism and developmental dyslexia), and research published by the National Literacy Trust has revealed that listening to audiobooks had made 52% of children feel more interested in reading, 42% of children feel more interested in writing and 31% of children simply feel better. There is much more to understand about the role of audio in improving learning outcomes and accessibility, and for more information see the work of Michelle Malomo and Sarah Pittaway from the University of Worcester. They are researching Universal Design for Learning, and within this the role audiobooks might play.

Our audiobooks are popular published titles from Education and Counselling, and these have been brought to life by skillful narrators. They are texts which come from the more vocational areas of our publishing, and these are subject areas where many of our readers are already working in professional roles, and so finding time for further study can be challenging. We hope the audiobooks will offer the busy student, teacher or counsellor a chance to tune into excellent content on topics that will push forward their study, their thinking and their professional development.

We have 5 titles available currently. You can find out more about our Education titles here and our Counselling titles here.

All audiobooks are available to download via the usual audio platforms such as Audible, Google, Apple, Kobo and a host of others. We hope our selection finds its way onto your virtual audio bookshelves.