Flipkart, India’s home-grown e-commerce marketplace, and Pocket FM, a personalised audio streaming service, announced a partnership today to enable audiobooks on a large scale. The collaboration would enable Flipkart to enter the audiobooks category with exclusive and licenced audiobooks via Pocket FM, making them available to its 400 million customer base. This also allows Pocket FM to broaden its audience reach and bring global and Indian bestsellers and authors to a wider audience at a lower cost.
With an estimated 25 million audiobook listeners, India is currently ranked third in the world. The opportunity for audiobooks is expected to double in the next few years, driven by the ability of audio storytelling and availability in Indian languages. Pocket FM has already achieved the highest traction in India, selling over 120,000 audiobooks per month since its official launch of the audiobook platform in March of this year.
Kanchan Mishra, Flipkart’s Business Head- FMCG, Home and General Merchandise, stated, “Audiobooks have gained great prominence during the pandemic, and this collaboration with Pocket FM falls in line with our aim to cater to consumers’ evolving needs.” This will enable authors to publish their work on our platform using audiobooks and reach our customer base. Flipkart will help the author gain the necessary exposure; it is more than just a distribution platform. We believe that this collaboration will be extremely strategic for the Indian audiobook market as we continue to meet our users’ appetite for regional content.”
“Since we officially launched the segment in March of this year, we have seen an exponential growth curve for audiobook consumption,” said Ashu Behl, SVP – Content at Pocket FM. We lead the audiobook category by about a quarter thanks to a carefully curated catalogue of books in native languages. Given Flipkart’s strong penetration in the country across various consumption categories, this collaboration will only strengthen our efforts and help our publisher and author community reach a wider audience, generating significant revenue from audiobooks.
Pocket FM will bring its audiobook library to Flipkart book stores, which will include bestsellers such as Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, Dale Carnegie’s The Art of Public Speaking, Ankur Warikoo’s Do Epic Shit, Shwetabh Gangwar’s The Rudest Book Ever, and many others. The vast majority of these best-selling audiobooks can only be found on Pocket FM. The audiobooks are available on Flipkart in Hindi and will soon be available in other Indian languages. How to get the Pocket FM audiobooks on Flipkart: Flipkart has an audiobook section. Purchase the desired audiobooks. The unique code can be found in your registered email. To listen to the audiobooks on Pocket FM, enter the code.
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