{"id":332912,"date":"2026-08-29T23:22:31","date_gmt":"2026-08-29T23:22:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/332912\/"},"modified":"2026-08-29T23:22:31","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T23:22:31","slug":"audible-book-store-whats-next-after-story-house-pop-up-in-nyc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/332912\/","title":{"rendered":"Audible Book Store: What’s Next After Story House Pop-Up in NYC"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tMore 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<\/a> 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 \u201cbookless bookstore.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFollowing a pop-up during the return of BookCon at NYC\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhat I was excited about was the opportunity to learn a lot more about customers and their experiences in that space,\u201d Audible\u2019s global head of brand content marketing James Finn tells Variety. \u201cAnd oftentimes, I don\u2019t have a sample size like that, and I don\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNick Castle<\/p>\n

\n\tLocated at 260 Bowery, the three-floor audiobook space offered guests the chance to browse titles using physical \u201cStory Tiles\u201d (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\u00a0Dolby Atmos\u00a0surround sound and a \u201cListening Bar\u201d with a dedicated \u201cStory Tender\u201d staffer offering up personalized recommendations for sampling.\u00a0There were creator programming and panels, book clubs, hands-on crafting activities, a pop-up cafe from Brooklyn\u2019s\u00a0Land to Sea and tons of merch.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut come June, it was all gone.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was very hard when we closed the doors, I will be honest,\u201d Finn says. \u201cAnd 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOut of the 301 titles that were on offer in Audible\u2019s Story House (\u201cWe never say what the one title is because everybody had an opinion \u2014 but we wanted to add that one more,\u201d Finn says) 98% of the audiobooks were listened to \u201cto any degree\u201d over the course of the month in operation. The most popular included \u201cProject Hail Mary,\u201d \u201cThe Hive: A Thriller,\u201d\u00a0\u201cGeorge Orwell\u2019s 1984,\u201d\u00a0\u201cJust Kiss Already,\u201d and Audible\u2019s full-cast recording of \u201cHarry Potter and the Sorcerer\u2019s Stone.\u201d <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tPhoto by Bryan Bedder\/Getty Images for Audible<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tGetty Images for Audible<\/p>\n

\n\tThere was also a lot of interest in Matt Dinniman\u2019s \u201cDungeon Crawler Carl\u201d LitRPG series, which released new book, \u201cA Parade of Horribles\u201d on May 12. \u201cPeople 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,\u201d Finn says.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut it wasn\u2019t just the \u201cCarl\u201d fans that were sticking around. Audible says it counted more than 15,000 \u201cdeep engagement\u201d experiences among its Story House guests, meaning the person did more than simply enter the space and browse.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPeople weren\u2019t just coming in and then leaving, or coming in and listening to a sample and leaving,\u201d Finn says. \u201cThey 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tFinn says the Audible team has also been looking at \u201cwhat are the learnings from the actual experience in New York that we can adapt to the experience within the app and within the service.\u201d The biggest takeaway: \u201cremoving friction and allowing more engagement and allowing more of an opportunity for personalization, so that they have the opportunity to go to what\u2019s interesting to them, but to sample and to try.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAudible<\/p>\n

\n\tAudible now has those 1,000 leftover \u201cStory Tiles,\u201d so there are some plans for what to do with those tactile representations of audiobooks.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe created that technology and that item. It didn\u2019t exist,\u201d Finn says. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFinn adds: \u201cBut after the fact, what we\u2019ve been doing is assessing what does Audible Story House look like in our plans for \u201927. Right now, what we\u2019re doing is similar to what you saw at BookCon. We\u2019re going to bring a version of that with the core fundamentals to Guadalajara Book Festival, and then Frankfurt Book Fair.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than half of Americans aged 18 and older, an estimated 157 million people, have listened to an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":332913,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[89081,9,56,63,65,64],"class_list":["post-332912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-audible","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332912"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332912\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/332913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}