A man use his iPad inside a local coffee shop in downtown Shanghai November 28, 2013.
A man use his iPad inside a local coffee shop in downtown Shanghai November 28, 2013. China's campaign against online rumours, which critics say is crushing free speech, has been highly successful in "cleaning" the Internet, a top official of the country's internet regulator said on Thursday. Reuters/Carlos Barria

Bolinda, Australia’s sole producer of audiobooks, announced that its sales have quadrupled since 2011. Today, it has over 30,000 titles, available not only in Australia, but also in the United States and the rest of the world.

In 2014, several talking books produced by Bolinda made it to various bestselling lists in the US. Among which is “The Unfinished Clue” by Georgette Heyer, which is hailed by the Washington Post as one of the five best audiobooks of the year.

In order to bring the audiobook technology to the public and to encourage more Australians to read, Bolinda developed BorrowBox, a library-liked application that lets readers share their books online. In 2013, BorrowBox won the prestigious Book Industry Digital Innovation Award for its novel idea of partnering with public libraries to advocate reading. The award-giving body also praised the company for its diverse list of titles, as well as for offering a wide range of very high standard books to the reading public.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald reporter Julie Power, the success of Bolinda not only benefited students who cannot afford to buy books, but also blue collar workers who aren’t typically linked with reading. Today, drivers are now enjoying the long drive without getting bored because of Bolinda-produced audiobooks.

“Farmers on tractors are listening during harvest, workers in remote areas, ranging from lawyers to miners, are borrowing for the long drives between jobs, families are borrowing books for those unable to read to themselves, and schools are using them to introduce children with literacy problems to the rhythm of language,” she wrote.

Last year, Amazon’s audiobook arm Audible partnered with Bolinda to reach the Australian reading public. The company said that it noticed the growing demand for good books from the region, which at that time remained untapped by the international market.

“We have a great partner here with Bolinda who’s been doing a lot of audio publishing for over a decade here, mainly focused on physical. We’re really excited to work with them and bring digital to the front of the market,” Will Lopes, Audible’s executive vice president of international operations, told Mumbrella.

Audible offers customers a $14.95 a month membership that would allow them to choose a title per month regardless of it’s a la carte price, length, and rating. Audioboom (LSE: BOOM), a spoken-word audio platform from the UK, features a selection of excepts of top Audible titles every month.

Audible is capable of catapulting locally recorded and written books to the international audiobook scene, as it is the largest audiobook producer, distributor, and seller in the world today. This means that Australian-published audiobooks could gain wider audience outside the region should they make the bestselling list.

Contact the writer: a.lu@ibtimes.com.au