audiobooks
(6)
TriPlay wanted your music to travel without a passport
A family-photo problem became a bet on media that moves freely between devices. Two decades later, the owner of eMusic is taking that argument from personal collections to music royalties.
Scribd Split Its Library Into Four - and Found a Bigger Story
The company once pitched one enormous digital shelf. Now it is betting that documents, decks, books and book clubs work better in separate rooms - connected by a single subscription strategy and a growing layer of AI.
Goodreads
Goodreads is the world's largest social platform for readers, letting people track what they read, rate and review books, get personalized recommendations, and connect with a community of more than 150 million members. Founded in 2006 by Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri Chandler and acquired by Amazon in 2013, it pairs a vast book database with tools for shelving, discovery, reading challenges, and the annual reader-voted Goodreads Choice Awards.
Speechify
Speechify is the world's largest text-to-speech platform, turning any text - PDFs, books, emails, Google Docs, web pages - into natural-sounding audio. Founded by dyslexic Brown University student Cliff Weitzman and his brother Tyler, the company grew from a personal reading aid into an AI voice empire spanning consumer apps, a voice cloning and dubbing studio for creators, and a text-to-speech API for developers. It serves 50+ million users across mobile, Chrome extension, and desktop, offers hundreds of voices in 50+ languages, and won the 2025 Apple Design Award for Inclusivity.
Spiegel & Grau
Spiegel & Grau is a New York independent, multi-platform publisher founded by veteran editors Celina 'Cindy' Spiegel and Julie Grau. After Penguin Random House shuttered their acclaimed imprint in 2019, the pair relaunched as an indie house in 2021, deliberately capping their list at 15-20 books a year so each title gets full editorial care across print, audio, podcast, and screen. The house treats a story as an asset to be developed across formats rather than a single book to be printed, and its very first independent release, Catherine Raven's 'Fox and I,' hit the New York Times bestseller list out of the gate.
Inkitt
Inkitt is a San Francisco-based AI-powered publishing and entertainment company that uses reader data and machine learning to identify breakout stories before they become hits. Writers upload fiction to Inkitt's community platform; the platform's algorithm tracks reader engagement to surface manuscripts with bestseller potential. Top stories move to Galatea, a premium immersive reading app offering ebooks, audiobooks, and chat-style fiction, and then to CandyJar, a short-drama streaming app. The result: a story-to-screen pipeline with 33 million users, a new million-dollar novel produced every four weeks, and 40x the hit-rate of traditional publishers.